Valentin Carderera y Solano

Valentin Carderera y Solano studied at Sertorian University of Huesca and Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. The recorded working language is Spanish. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are portrait. Places of work recorded in the authority are Madrid. Positions recorded include court painter and member of the Real Academia de la Historia. Work by Valentin Carderera y Solano is recorded in the collections of Museo del Prado, Museum of Romanticism and Museum of Huesca.

He attended the Universidad Sertoriana de Huesca, where he studied philosophy then, thanks to the patronage of José de Palafox, studied drawing in Zaragoza with Buenaventura Salesa and painting in Madrid in the Royal Academy of Arts, where his teachers were Mariano Salvador Maella and José de Madrazo. In 1822, he won a grant to study in Rome, awarded by José António, Duke of Villahermosa. He remained in Italy until 1831, travelling widely and creating sketches and watercolors. Back in Spain, in 1836, he received a commission to make an inventory of the nationalised works of art from suppressed monasteries in Castile. From 1838, he was a governing member of the board at the Museo Real de Pintura y Escultura. He was also a member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where he taught art history and, from 1843, he held a chair at the Real Academia de la Historia. In 1873, he helped establish the Museo de Huesca by donating paintings from his own collection. His most familiar works are portraits of famous Spaniards throughout history; gathered together in a large anthology called Iconografía Española (1855, enlarged in 1864), which constitutes his magnum opus. In order to defray the costs of publication, he had to sell his collection of drawings and prints to the Biblioteca Nacional. As a writer, he also contributed regular essays on cultural subjects to El Artista, Semanario Pintoresco Español, El Museo Universal and the French Gazette des Beaux-Arts. In 1866, he edited the first edition of the Discursos practicables del nobilísimo arte de la pintura, written in 1675 by Jusepe Martínez. As a collector, he was particularly fond of the drawings and engravings of Francisco de Goya and owned a large collection of them. In 1835, he wrote the first substantial biography of Goya, which was published in El Artista.

• More works by Carderera @ the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica