Exhibition reveals the facet of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer as a keen draftsman

Seville. The Museum of Fine Arts of Seville dedicates an exhibition to the Bécquer family and offers an unpublished section dedicated to the satirical drawings populated by skeletons by the author of Rhymes and legends. Lines on loose sheets, two complete albums and a small attached notebook “allow us to get closer to the surprising themes that the poet cultivated with a dexterous hand.”

According to the board in a statement, the exhibition highlights “one of the least known aspects of the legacy of the popular Sevillian author, revealing the great quality, precision, irony and acuity of his pen”, in the words of the Minister of Culture and Sports, Patricia del Pozo.

For the director of the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville, Valme Muñoz, this selection allows “for the first time the drawings of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer to be presented to the public with the due attention they deserve.”

In addition to writing poetry, prose, stories and journalistic chronicles, the Sevillian author, one of the most read and appreciated in the Spanish language, drew on loose sheets and in letters, notebooks, albums and even in his manuscripts.

Not in vain had he been born into a family of Sevillian artists: his father was José Domínguez Bécquer, initiator of the saga; his uncle, the sought-after costumbrista painter Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer, and his older brother, Valeriano, one of the sharpest draftsmen of the mid-19th century.

Coveted works

Born in Seville in 1836, when he was barely 12 years old, Gustavo Adolfo entered the School of Fine Arts, then located in the Museum of Paintings – today, the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville. However, he soon abandoned academic studies as they seemed routine to him. He then went to his uncle’s workshop, Joaquín, where he met his brother, Valeriano, who was learning the trade there.

The poet, who also showed good talent for music, wanted to pursue a career as a painter under the guidance of his influential uncle. Although his attempt to pursue a painting career was unsuccessful, Gustavo Adolfo drew very well, as shown by the fact that his works were highly coveted by his contemporaries.

The author of The devil’s cross He gave away the drawings that came from his pen to his friends and acquaintances. Works that, in many cases, as the emeritus professor of Spanish literature at the University of Zaragoza, Jesús Rubio Jiménez, has documented, have disappeared. There are only references to the existence of some, including a self-portrait, but there is no record of the originals, “very few have reached us.”

Likewise, they make up the fifth block of the exhibition The Bécquers, a lineage of artists, which brings together in the Sevillian art gallery until next March 15 more than 150 works – including oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, lithographs and books – by these four members of the Bécquer family, loaned for the occasion by up to a dozen Andalusian, national and international institutions and collections.

Among the pieces on display, two drawings on loose sheets of paper stand out, one made in ink and the other with graphite. The first, dated around 1860, represents a gypsy, who wears a short suit, is touched by a large catite and carries a staff, a blanket and some scissors. Attributes that seem to indicate the profession of shearer and that, according to the curator of this exhibition, the art historian Manuel Piñanes García Olías, “lead one to think that it represents a real person that Gustavo Adolfo got to know.”

Play tennis with a skull

The second of the drawings drawn on a loose sheet of paper has a very different nature, given that it is a satirical and grotesque creation starring one of the most recurring themes in the poet’s graphic work: skeletons.

In this case, it represents a bullfighter, with a muleta and a cape, standing in front of the bones of a bull about to be finished off. The disconcerting images of skeletons also populate the small notebook, attached to an album and collected in this exhibition titled Dead for Laughs: Oddities dedicated to Mademoiselle Julie, by GA Becker.

In any case, these phantasmagorias were not a rarity at the time, since, as Professor Rubio indicates, “they are everyday in their post-romantic context.” Although Gustavo Adolfo went a step further by incorporating these satirical skeletons into the catalog of his literary obsessions, representing, among other ghostly scenes, a couple of skeletons playing tennis with a skull, a circus performance with skeletons jumping through a hoop, tombs that house the skeletal corpse of a young maiden, the ceremony of a love courtship in which she and he are just bones or a duel to the death between skeletons mounted on a horse and wielding a spear.

Finally, the exhibition brings together two albums that constitute “the largest collection of Gustavo Adolfo’s known plastic work.” These are the albums of Julia Espín, whose paternal family gathering in Madrid the Bécquer brothers regularly attended. Custodied in the National Library, they display a good sample of the themes and issues that interested the poet: theatrical scenes, grotesque drawings and others that reflect the universe of the feminine world.

One of the most modern of this series is, without a doubt, the one that shows a man sleeping, agitated by a nightmare while he is watched attentively by a mocking devil carrying a disturbing woman tied by a thread like a kite.

The influence of Goya’s monsters and a marvelous imagination fly over these drawings with firm lines and undeniable artistic quality. As a culmination of this section, the portrait of the poet made by his brother Valeriano is included, which is kept in the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville and has been restored for the occasion.

Also on display is a first edition of Rhymes and legendswhich only saw the light of day posthumously in 1871 – the poet had died a year earlier – at the initiative of his friends, who had to make a popular subscription to publish them. It is a fundamental work in the history of literature, which would take more than five years to achieve the immense appreciation and popularity that it now enjoys.