Lot 50: Martín Tovar y Tovar (Venezuelan 1827-1902)

Martín Tovar y Tovar (Venezuelan 1827-1902)
Estudio de Tovar y Tovar para Junín
inscribed 'Estudio de Tovar y Tovar para Junín' (lower right)
oil on canvas
77¼ x 59¼ in. (196.2 x 150 cm.)
Painted circa 1884.

Gift from the artist to Luis Romero Zuloaga (artist's grand-nephew).
By descent to Carlota Reverón de Romero.
By descent to Carlos Romero Reverón Zuloaga.
By descent to Ana Teresa Machado de Romero.
By descent to Carlos Luis Romero Machado.
Private collection, Boca Ratón.

Martín Tovar y Tovar was one of the most distinguished Venezuelan painters of the 19th century, who was commissioned to create art works for the new seat of political power: the National Capitol. There he portrayed a series of military victories from the Wars of Independence. This canvas is a study for one of his most important works, The Battle of Junín, a mural done for the Capitol.

Born in Caracas, Tovar y Tovar took his first art classes (1839-40) under Antonio José Carranza and in 1841 under Carmelo Fernández and Celestino Martínez at the Colegio La Paz, Caracas. Like other South American artists of his generation, he went to Spain to study at Madrid's renown Real Academia de San Fernando (Royal Academy of San Fernando) in 1850. From there he went to Paris, where studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, observed the masterpieces of the Louvre and elsewhere, and surely partook of the local café life. He was back in Caracas sometime in 1855, but perhaps not before he attended the Paris Universal Exhibition. These experiences made him one of the best trained and most cosmopolitan painters in South America at the time, alongside Peruvian Francisco Laso. Back home he taught drawing and painted portraits. By the early 1870s Tovar y Tovar was making a name for himself, showing his work in successive exhibitions beginning with the first Exposición Anual de Bellas Artes held in Caracas in 1872. His became the official painter for the government of President Antonio Guzmán Blanco (1829-1899), an avid Francophile who must have found the artist's Parisian background simpatico.(1)

During Guzmán Blanco's reign as dictator of Venezuela from 1870 to 1888, art and public works flourished with the construction of an Opera House, Pantheon, and a new National Capitol consisting of a two- building complex: Presidential Palace and Seat of Congress. Art became the means to strengthen feelings of national unity and identity with the military victories from the Wars of Independence as the ideal subject. Tovar y Tovar created public art celebrating the heroes and events of Venezuelan Independence. After 1883, the Centennial of Caracas-born Símon Bolívar's birth, he began work on the Capitol's famous Salón Elíptico, an oval hall surmounted by an extraordinary domed ceiling covered by his mural of the Battle of Carabobo (1888). Two adjoining halls round out the series of images that amount to a national Book of Genesis: in the Salón Rojo he painted The Battle of Boyacá while the Salón Amarillo has on its ceiling a depiction of The Battle of Junín. This latter scene depicts the moment on August 6, 1824 when Liberator Símon Bolívar and his trusted lieutenant Antonio José de Sucre sent the might Spanish army in retreat at the Lake of Junín, high in the Peruvian Andes. This victory set the stage for the Battle of Ayacucho, where another stunning patriot victory assured freedom for Peru and all of South America.(2)

Adhering to the academic training he received in Paris, Tovar y Tovar made many sketches and studies in preparation for this huge multi-figured ceiling painting including this Estudio para Batalla de Junín, of Bolívar on horseback. Only a child at the time of Bolívar's death, the artist had to rely on likenesses by others for his portrait in military attire, some of which he could have seen in the government buildings of Caracas, and others widely circulated in prints and coins. In collaboration with his government patron, Tovar y Tovar modeled his Bolívar after a print of The Equestrian Portrait of Napoleon I (1810; Museo Napoleonico, Rome) by Joseph Chabord.(3) Both depict the military leader on his white horse at the edge of the battlefield, and position the horse's head and leg similarly, with only the left front hoof raised: according to military symbolism, the sign that the sitter survived the battle.(4) Tovar y Tovar provides a naturalistic rendering of the figure in sunlight, with the shadows consistently rendered. He also demonstrated knowledge of the heterogeneous topography of the Junín region where the battle was fought, rimming the picture with the Andean peaks. Another specific detail is the saber, absent from Napoleon, which hangs at Bolívar's side. For the Victory at Junín was the last true cavalry charge in the western world, where no shot was fired and only sabers used. Portraying Bolívar for Guzmán Blanco's new Venezuela via Napoleonic imperial imagery, the artist's chain of associations between the leaders past and present would not have been lost on contemporary viewers. This painting and its companion pieces comprise their joint legacy which initiated Venezuela's epic historical tradition, perpetuated by Arturo Michelena and Tito Salas.

Katherine E. Manthorne, Professor of Modern Art of the Americas, The Graduate Center, CUNY.

1) This information is derived from the standard biographic sources: E. Planchart, Don Martín Tovar y Tovar 1828 [sic]-1902, Caracas, 1952, and J. Calzadilla, Martín Tovar y Tovar, Caracas, 1977.
2) N. Leonardini, ed. La Pintura de la independencia en el arte lationamericano del siglo XIX, Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Vicerrectorado de Investigación, 2009, provides interesting discussions of the relation of art to the events of independence.
3) Tovar y Tovar's composition repeats Chabord's in reverse, suggesting that he was working from a print source.
4) A. Boime, Art in the Age of Bonapartism, 1800-1815, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp.35 ff.