Confirmed by the Fundacion Benlliure, Madrid

Provenance: Don Pedro Alejandro Paterno (1857– 1911) and Doña Luisa Piñeyro de Lugo y Merino (Sra. de Paterno, d. 1897)

ABOUT THE WORK

The Artist’s Artist Mariano Benlliure y Gil by LUCRECIA ENSEÑAT BENLLIURE Mariano Benlliure Foundation, Madrid Mariano Benlliure Gil (Valencia, 1862 – Madrid, 1947). Spanish sculptor. Son of a modest decorative painter who introduced his four sons – Blas, José, Juan Antonio and Mariano – to art from childhood. He spent his boyhood in Valencia and in 1874 he moved with his family to Madrid. After starting out in sculpture in a self-taught way and learning the trades related to sculpture, working in different artisan workshops, he traveled to Rome in 1881 to complete his training. There he perfected himself in the mastery of techniques and materials, in contact with the most important artistic foundries and with frequent visits to the Carrara quarries; In addition to being illustrated mainly with the study of classical, Renaissance and Baroque statuary, and the sculpture of the Italy of his time. From Rome, he sent his works to the National Exhibitions of Fine Arts. It was at that time in Rome when the brothers Mariano and Juan Antonio Benlliure began what would become a close friendship with the painter Juan Luna, and through Luna with other Filipino artists such as Resurrección Hidalgo, Pedro Paterno and Miguel Zaragoza, as reflected in the photograph belonging to to the Archive of the Mariano Benlliure Foundation. Benlliure modeled the busts of two of them, Luna and Paterno. In 1884 he won a second medal with Accidenti!, the sculpture that made him famous (Private Collection). Curiously, in that same exhibition Luna and Hidalgo were awarded for their works Spoliarium (first medal) and Las Virgenes Cristianas Expuestas al Populacho (second medal), respectively. Three years later, in 1887, Benlliure won the first medal with the statue of the painter José de Ribera (Plaza del poeta Llorente, Valencia). In 1895, the year he opened a studio in Madrid, he achieved the medal of honor with the statue for the monument to the writer Antonio Trueba (Jardines de Albia, Bilbao). At the same time and in international exhibitions, he won gold medals in 1894 in Vienna (Bust of the painter Francisco Domingo Marqués, Museum of Fine Arts, Valencia) and in Munich (Allegory of the Navy, Monument to the Marquis of Campo, Valencia), and in 1900 the Grand Prix at the Universal in Paris with an important set of works, among which the Gayarre mausoleum (Roncal, Navarra) stood out. In 1910 he participated, with a significant number of works, both in the International Exhibition of Contemporary Medals organized by the Numismatic Society of New York, and in the exhibitions commemorating the independence of several Latin American countries, in Mexico, Santiago de Chile and Buenos Aires, where he was awarded the Grand Prize for Sculpture for Velázquez monument, which was acquired by the Argentine government. His work is extremely extensive and fruitful, and covers the different genres, typologies and sculptural techniques. Only in monumental sculpture he made more than fifty works distributed mainly throughout Spain and Latin America, but which also reached some parts of Europe and the United States of America and the Philippines. For these last two countries, he sculpted the monuments to William Atkinson Jones (Warsaw, Virginia, 1926), a member of the United States of America Congress and his Committee on Insular Affairs, and one of the main promoters of the independence of the Philippines; and to Arthur Walsh Fergusson, American diplomat and secretary of the Philippine Government Commission, (Manila, 1913). The monument to Fergusson has been exhibited since recent years in the National Museum of the Philippines in “The Spoliarium Hall”, together with the large canvas by Luna that gives the room its name. Mariano Benlliure approached his works naturally, he had an extraordinary facility for modeling and chiseling, and a personal sense of the combination of materials, generally marble and bronze, achieving an exquisite surface finish. His facet as a painter, poorly developed professionally, is present in all of his work. Through the play of chiaroscuro and a painterly modeling he gave to his works almost tactile qualities, strongly expressive. He paid equal attention to detail, which he executed with great ease and virtuosity far removed from all mannerism, as to the harmonic balance of his compositions. He assumed important public positions related to the world of culture and Fine Arts: between 1901- 1903 he was Director of the Academy of Spain in Rome, from 1917 to 1919 General Director of Fine Arts and from 1917 to 1931 Director of the Museum of Modern Art of Madrid – later integrated into the Prado Museum. He belonged to various Academies of Fine Arts: San Fernando in Madrid, San Carlos in Valencia, San Luis in Zaragoza, San Telmo in Malaga, San Lucas in Rome, Brera in Milan, Carrara and Paris; and he received important decorations, such as the Legion of Honor of France, Commander of the Order of the Crown of Italy or the Grand Cross of Alfonso X of Spain.