JOSÉ GALLEGOS Y ARNOSA (Jerez de la Frontera, Cádiz, 1857 - Anzio, Italy, 1917)."Scene outside the

JOSÉ GALLEGOS Y ARNOSA (Jerez de la Frontera, Cádiz, 1857 - Anzio, Italy, 1917).
"Scene outside the Basilica of San Marco.
Oil on panel.
Signed and located (Venice) in the lower right area.
Measurements: 16 x 9.5 cm; 26 x 20 cm (frame).
José Gallegos y Arnosa, painter and sculptor from Jerez in the second third of the 19th century, was born on 3 May 1857 in the Convent of La Victoria in Porvera Street in Jerez, currently the headquarters of the School of Applied Arts and Artistic Trades and the Business School of that city. As a child he was attracted to the Fine Arts, a passion he shared with Salvador Sánchez Barbudo, who was the same age as him and a regular companion. Together they frequently visited the studio of the romantic painter Luís Sevíl and attended the artistic and literary gatherings organised by the Ysasi sisters.
The young José spent a period of apprenticeship at the Casino de Artesanos de Jerez and received advice from artists such as Adolfo del Águila y Camacho. Guillermo Cook, who would later become the active director of the Academia de BBAA in Jerez, pressed for his parents to provide the means for José to study Fine Arts, given the incredible faculties with which the young man was endowed.Once this first stage of apprenticeship was over, in 1873, at the age of 16, he went to Madrid as a boarder of Guillermo Garvey, a winemaking businessman and his father's patron. There, at the San Fernando Academy in Madrid, he began a new stage of his training under the tutelage of Federico Madrazo, and in 1878 he went to Rome to broaden his knowledge and attend classes at the Academia Chigi and the Círculo Internacional de Bellas Artes. There he met Sánchez Barbudo and José Villegas Cordero, then the most influential painter in the colony of Spanish artists in the Italian capital. He decided to settle permanently in the Eternal City and, following the successes he achieved in several exhibitions, which were reflected in the art critics of the time, and encouraged by the prevailing Orientalist fashion, he travelled to Tunisia and Morocco, attracted by the light and the suggestive atmosphere of those exotic lands. The result of those trips was the work "Cortejo nupcial en Marruecos" ("Wedding Procession in Morocco"), which he presented at the Círculo de BBAA Exhibition and which was acquired by the Spanish State. In 1884 he painted "Botín de Guerra" ("Spoils of War"), which won a third medal at the National Exhibition of that year. He sent several paintings on orientalist themes to the Bosch and Hernández galleries and to the Círculo de BBAA in Madrid.
In the middle of that decade he travelled around Italy with Sánchez Barbudo, visiting churches, cathedrals and basilicas, which were fundamental to the change of subject matter he introduced into his work in those years: everyday scenes in interiors and exteriors of important cathedrals, the subject of the present pair of panels, which undoubtedly date from this period. In 1891 he won the Gold Medal at the International Exhibition of Fine Arts in Berlin with "Wedding in the Sacristy of the Cathedral of Seville", an award conferred personally by Emperor Wilhelm II of Prussia and granted by an International Jury made up of the most outstanding personalities in the world of the Arts, Sciences and Literature of the time. Guillermo Garvey, his old patron, commissioned him to build an architectural monument to provide the church of Santiago with an extraordinary work of unquestionable beauty: "El Baldaquino de Santiago" monument built on a base of grey Bardiglio marble, in Carrara marble ten metres high made of 43 pieces of marble 36 bronze sculptures and tabernacle in fire-gilded bronze and with a wonderful door in solid embossed silver, in the centre of which is the Redeemer in high relief surrounded by a Heavenly choir in bas-relief.