Spanish painter, born at Eibar, in the Basque country, the son of the metalworker and damascener Placido Zuloaga, and grandson of the organizer and director of the royal armoury in Madrid. The career chosen for him by his father was that of an architect, and with this object in view he was sent to Rome, where he immediately followed the strong impulse that led him to painting. After only six months’ work he completed his first picture, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1890. Continuing his studies in Paris, he was strongly influenced by Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. Only on his return to his native soil he found his true style, which is based on the national Spanish tradition embodied in the work of Velázquez, Zurbarán, El Greco, and Goya. His own country was slow in acknowledging the young artist whose strong, decorative, rugged style was the very negation of the aims of such well-known modern Spanish artists as Fortuny, Madrazo, and Benlliure. It was first in Paris, and then in Brussels and other continental art centres, that Zuloaga was hailed by the reformers as the regenerator of Spanish national art and as the leader of a school. He is now represented in almost every great continental gallery. Two of his canvases are at the Luxembourg, one at the Brussels Museum (“Avant la Corrida”), and one (“The Poet Don Miguel”) at the Vienna Gallery. The Pau Museum owns an interesting portrait of a lady, the Barcelona Municipal Museum the important group “Amies,” the Venice Gallery, “Madame Louise”; the Berlin Gallery, “The Topers.” Other examples are in the Budapest, Stuttgart, Ghent and Posen galleries and in many important private collections.
A fully illustrated account of the artist and his work, by M. Utrillo, was published in a special number of Forma (Barcelona, 1907).
Zuloaga had become by 1921 the head of a definite school of Basque and Castilian painters, whose work was marked by a realistic and decorative treatment of contemporary Spanish life, consciously based on Velázquez, El Greco and Goya. His art showed increasing emphasis on silhouette, simplification of form and use of broad masses of somber colour relieved by splashes of more vivid tints. In his figure compositions a low horizon and a panoramic background were favourite devices for obtaining a decorative monumental effect. Women and the nude figure played an important part in Zuloaga’s work. In his portraits, of which typical examples are “Lucienne Bréval in Carmen,” “Cousin Candida,” “The Duke of Alba,” and “Countess Mathieu de Noailles,” emphasis is on the type rather than the individual, and the combination of realism and simplification tends towards caricature. This also appears in his genre paintings of Spanish types, peasants, dancers, bull-fighters, priests and beggars, such as “Old Castile,” “The Bottleseller” and “The Witches of San Millan.” His landscapes, mainly painted round Burgos, Salamanca and Segovia, have a similar bizarre, fantastic quality. His later work includes “My Uncle Daniel and his Family” (1912), “A Cardinal” (1914), “Toreadors” (1914), “Un Versolari” (1916). An important retrospective exhibition of his work was seen at the 1919 International Exhibition at Bilbao, and he was represented by three portraits in the 1920–1 Exhibition of Spanish Paintings at Burlington House.
See also L. Bénédite, Ignacio Zuloaga (1912); Juan de la Encina, El Arte de Ignacio Zuloaga (1916).
