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Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta was a Spanish painter, born in Eibar (Guipuzcoa), near the monastery of Loyola.
He was the son of metalworker and damascener Plácido Zuloaga and grandson of the organizer and director of the royal armoury (Don Eusebio) in Madrid. His uncle was Daniel Zuloaga. His great-grandfather who was also the royal armourer was a friend and contemporary of Goya.
In his youth, he drew and worked in the armourer's workshop of his father, Plácido. His father's craftmanship, a familial trade, was highly respected throughout Europe, but he intended his son for either commerce, engineering, or architecture, but during a short trip to Rome with his father, he decided to become a painter. His first painting was exhibited in Paris in 1890
At the age of 18 he moved to Paris, settling in Montmartre, to find work and training as a painter. He was nearly destitute, and lived off some meager contributions by his mother and the benevolence of fellow Spaniards, including Francisco Durrio, Pablo de Uranga, and Santiago Rusiñol.
After only six months' work he completed his first picture, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1890. Continuing his studies in Paris, where he lived for five years, he was in contact with post-impressionists such as Ramon Casas, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, yet his tendencies were always to a thematic that was more ethnic in scope.
He attempted to gain success during a sojourn in London; but lackluster patronage led him to return to Spain, settling in Seville, then Segovia, and developed a style based on a realist Spanish tradition, recalling Velázquez and Murillo in their earthy colouring and genre themes. He painted portraits of attired bullfighters and flamenco dancers; or portraits of family members and friends in such attire. He also painted village dwarves (El enano Gregorio el Botero, and beggars, often as stark figures in a dreary landscape with a traditional landscape or town in the background. He also painted some village-scape scenes. He favored earth or muted tones, including maroon, black, and grey, with the exception of colorful folk attire or the bright red cassock in some paintings.
Zuloaga and his patrons felt slighted in 1900, when his painting of Before the Bull-fight was rejected for inclusion into the Spanish representation at the Universal Exposition in Brussels. In 1899, one of his paintings exhibited in Paris had been purchased for the Luxembourg Palace. However, he did exhibit the painting at the Exposition of the Libre Esthetique in Brussels, and did see it acquired by the Modern Gallery in Brussels. He was accepted into the Venice Biennale in 1901 and 1903, and displayed 34 canvases at the Barcelona International exposition of 1907.
Among one of the more prominently displayed works is his Cristo de la Sangre (Christ of the Blood) or Hermandad del Cristo Crucificado (Brotherhood of the Crucified Christ), on display at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. He also painted a similarly painting of individuals undergoing a traditional mortification of the flesh and a bleeding crucified Christ called The Flagellants (1900). These paintings were praised by Unamuno in his book on De Arte Pictorico as being honest representation of Spain: a Spain religious and tragic, a black Spain. rooted in the particularly Spanish Catholic fascination with mutilating penance.
Brinton in his review of an exposition in America in 1909, he states that:
It is this racy and picturesque life which Zuloaga seeks above all else to place on record, and it is these popular types unspoiled by ruthless modernism which he pursues into the farthest corners of his native land. In this zealous quest of congenial models he hesitates at nothing. He will haunt for hours a fiesta on the outskirts of some provincial town, or hasten away to the mountains, passing months at a time with smugglers and muleteers, with the superstitious fanatics of Anso in the extreme north of Aragon or with the monkish cutthroats of Las Baluecas, a little village on the southern boundary line of Salamanca.
Gil says that the faces of the old folk he paints are
severe, roughly mystical, beset by painful thoughts, shadowed by the remembrance of the glory they once were, they have sad souls, moaning under the weight of an ideal of centuries, they are not individual representations, but the synthesis of the sadness of the Spanish Soul.
One of the American collections to feature Zuloaga's work is the Johns Hopkins University's Evergreen Museum & Library, Baltimore, Maryland. Officially owned by the Evergreen House Foundation, an independent entity started by Zuloaga's great friend, philanthropist Alice Warder Garrett (1877-1952), Evergreen's works include full-length portraits of Mrs. Garrett (1915; 1928); a seated portrait of Ambassador John Work Garrett (1872-1942); a Spanish landscape; a painting based on the opera, "Goyescas"; and a landscape of Calatayud (Spain).
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