Ignacio Zuloaga Y Zabaleta

1870 – 1945

Spanish Basque painter. He studied in Paris in 1891, coming under the influence of Impressionism and of the group of Catalan painters around Santiago Rusinol. His visit to Andalusia in 1892 provided the key to his later work, leading him to replace the grey tonalities of his Paris paintings with more brightly coloured images of Spanish folkloric subjects and of male or female figures in regional dress, for example Merceditas (1911/13; Washington, National Gallery of Art). Zuloaga turned to Castilian subjects in works such as Segoviano and Toreros de Pueblo (both 1906; both Madrid, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo) after the defeat suffered by Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898; like the group of writers known as the 'Generation of '98', with whom he was associated and who were among his most articulate supporters, he sought to encourage the regeneration of his country's culture but with a critical spirit. Zuloaga attached to the nationalist Falangist forces during the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorial regime of the Generalissimo Franco, whose fawning portrait he painted in 1940.

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