prilidiano pueyrredon He was born 200 years ago, on January 24, 1823 and, when he died on November 3, 1870, he left a trail on the road. Thanks to him, precisely on November 3, the Day of the Plastic Artist is celebrated in our country. And with just cause.
Prilidiano was the only son of Juan Martín de Pueyrredón, the military man who was Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, in the first decisive years of our independence from Spain.
related to Juan Manuel de RosasPrilidiano also had a half-sister from his father’s second wedding and at least one other half-brother from an extramarital affair.
From his holy mother, the Buenos Aires patrician María Calixta Tellechea y Caviedes, he only inherited lands and fortunes. And it is said of her father that he was the first Argentine politician who lied his statement of assets when assuming the highest existing public office. Realizing this, President Bernardino Rivadavia i miss it to amend his bad example, although over the years it rained imitators of Juan Martín de Pueyrredón.
Details aside, the privileges of Prilidiano’s cradle gave him an assured future at birth, not only because of the family estates but also because, thanks to the pretext that with Juan Manuel de Rosas it was impossible to trade with France and other European powers, the entire family emigrated to Cádiz in 1835 to support their business of sale of hides Argentines abroad.
Prilidiano Pueyrredón, first chronicler
Although Prilidiano’s training was basically European, he took with him the hallmark of elementary Buenos Aires education at the aristocratic Colegio de la Independencia. And another equally or more valuable: pictorial passion, something that was not taught in schools and that Prilidiano learned from his own freedmanFermin Gayoso.
He received his engineering degree from the Polytechnic School of Paris and in 1841 family businesses took him ping pong through Rio de Janeiro and France, where in 1844 he graduated as an architect and lost his head due to the romantic canvases of Delacroix.
Between twists and turns, it is known that, since he could do without a salary, he worked 10 years ad honorem as an urban planning consultant in Buenos Aires: he remodeled the Buenos Aires Church of El Pilar, modernized the current Plaza de Mayo (then Plaza de la Victoria), redesigned the Mayo Pyramid, built the Azcuénaga Mansion (current Olivo Presidential Fifths, where the nation’s presidents live) and exploit the Bosque Alegre farmhouse (now the Pueyrredón de San Isidro Museum).
Prilidiano Pueyrredón, 200 years
Busy as he was, since his Pueyrredón Farm In San Isidro, Prilidiano made time to carve himself out as the first pictorial chronicler of the 19th century, of a country that made its way as best it could between the pampas and the city.
His paintings qualified him as “the first Creole”, not only because of his romantic vocation but because they did not stop looking at his surroundings and he portrayed it picturesquely.
Installed in San Isidro, he alternated hunting partridges with painting everything that occurred to him, while humming French operas (the Huguenots by Giacomo Meyerbeer, was one of his favorites) among his easel tasks.
And even if he didn’t tune in quite right, at least the 223 paintings that are attributed to him with certainty appeared. For the society of his time, Prilidiano was only the son of the brigadier who was portrayed to the high society of the 19th century in Buenos Aires.
However, only 137 of his oil paintings are portraits – the most famous of all, without a doubt, was that of the federal princess, Manuelita Rosas when she was 34 years old, in 1951.
Cheer up to smoke the pipe of peace with the enemy? There are certain doubts, but it is true that just one year before the end of the rosismhad to smoke the strict “supervision” of the fun club Buenos Aires of “Tatita Rosas”, who claimed for the heiress the “analogous posture to her morals and rank”, a “smiling expression” and a dress with the “federal colorado”. Impossible to feel free and creative, especially since he imagined Manuelita with purple clothes.
Prilidiano Pueyrredón and criollismo
For this reason, Prilidiano Pueyrredón is not “the first Argentine painter” because high society would have chosen him so that future generations would have an idea of what the owners of Argentina looked like.
Argentine art is a long avenue that starts in Prilidiano Puerredón because he was the first to take the pulse of national landscapes.
We owe it to him – and not to florence molina fields– the first rural gauchaje postcards with ponchos, spurs and panties; the pouts of the Chinese with braids, skirts and handkerchiefs; the bustle of the carts; the rodeo epic; the rowdy nap; the posts and the oxen without rest; the dachshund and the hunting springer…
However, the first snapshots of the suburb were also his: the slave throwing corn at the chickens from the patio, the children and street vendors, the neighbors, the cistern, the servants… Luck of Manuel Mujica Láinez from the 19th century, Prilidiano gave silhouette and color to the mysterious buenos aireswhen it was still a mixture of yuyo, center and suburb.
And so they were happening GauchosPeace at the ranch, A stop on the road, The Rodeo, The siesta under the ombú tree, In the corral, A stop at the grocery store, Bosque de Palermo, Washerwomen in the LowerLandscape Tres Bocas Tigre, A Sunday in the suburbs of San Isidro, The foremen, La estancia, Patio porteño in 1850, Buenos Aires corner, Chinita in the kitchen, Lady sewing a turkey, among other works considered masterpieces in the history of autochthonous art.
Prilidiano Pueyrredón: Roses and Nudes
His reading of the Argentine landscape was not that of English travelers making a stopover in the exotic Rio de la Plata estuary, but that of a curious Argentine educated in Paris and without the slightest idea of how to manage a field, even if he launched himself as an agricultural producer so as not to lose his inheritance. familiar.
After the lethal blow that rosismo received on February 3, 1852 in the Battle of Caseros, Prilidiano returned to Buenos Aires in 1854, with a head full of European romanticism.
However, despite the parade of ponchos and horses, he was also the first painter of female nudes in Buenos Aires. At least two works are known of this facet of his artistic personality –although it is believed that there were more: the NAP Y bathroom.
Both are two powerful oil paintings from 1865 that the National museum of fine arts and in them the author ventured into realism, using his own prodigious housekeeper as a model, moving away from the canonical European romantic nudes that took refuge in their own mythologies to insinuate eroticism.
Pueyrredón’s nudes are ladies naked with all the lettersthat are unprecedented in their two Bathers in the Luján River.
“There are some of those pages that you can’t talk about, but you loved looking at them. We leave them behind because our word is not bright enough to be able to dress nakedness with which the painter shows that he is capable, with only the help of a brush, a grain of ground earth and a thimble of oil, of robbing the arteries its pulsations, to the complexion its softness, to the human forms the eloquence that God has given them to speak to the senses and the affections”, commented a modest journalist of the time.
And these nudes were hung in their own atelier and showed them to everyone who wanted to see them.
bathroom It ended up being owned by the family of the scientist Francisco Pascasio Moreno, the “expert”, who donated it to the National Museum of Fine Arts.
Prilidiano Pueyrredón and Amalita Fortabat
Most of Prilidiano Pueyrredón’s works are in Argentine museums, but several of them changed owners in at least 14 auctions Argentine and international And those transactions reached historic records in the art market.
Although Emilio Pettoruti and Antonio Berni head the ranking of the best valued Argentine authors, several auctions lowered the hammer, placing some of Prilidiano’s works through the roof.
Setting aside in the corral it was sold $551,530 (VAT included) in 1999 and ended up integrating the Art Collection of Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat; The foremen, at US$515,660 (VAT included) the same year and her buyer was also Amalita Fortabat, who came to add 5 Prilidianos to her artistic treasures.
for the orange tree it was paid $236,000 plus taxes, in 2017; Buenos Aires corner auctioned for $210,000 in 2002; The High of San IsidroFortabat also kept it for US$147,575, in 1992; Cart stop in San Isidro, US$112,100 (plus taxes). And other cases could be added, but they would already exceed the comparison criteria.
Until today, the highest price paid for a work by an Argentine plastic artist was US$794,500 with a check signed in Christie’s of New York for the acquisition of concertby Emilio Petorutti, in 2012.
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