We visit the Foundation and the Museum dedicated to the 19th-century painter, one of the most important artists in Asturies, to find out what cider motifs can be found in his oil paintings, sketches or drawings.
LA SIDRA.- Evaristo Valle is one of the most important artists in Asturies. “It is an exceptional value within the Spanish painting of its time for its lyricism, for its refined colorism, for the originality of its sense of landscape and humanity,” said the art historian Lafuente Ferrari. LA SIDRA magazine has visited the Evaristo Valle Foundation to find out what cider motifs we can find in the author’s work.
Around the figure of Valle there are many anecdotes that reinforce the idea of a lonely painter who spent his childhood in a family with financial problems. a son of the XIX century bourgeoisie. When painters arrive in Paris, they do spend their money on the bohemian, but it must be said that before arriving, they leave families that can afford to have artist children ”, she points out.
Valle traveled to the city of light in 1898 and worked on a lithograph. In 1900 he returned to Spanish territory, but in 1903 he returned to Paris as a painter, having obtained a grant from the Xixón city council. “But it is important to point out that before going to Paris, even before traveling to Madrid, he is already looking for what he knows there is. For example, before leaving Xixón he already shows interest in artists such as El Greco, Velázquez or Goya. Today it seems to us that these painters are almost like the holy trinity of art, but at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th, that was not the case ”, says the doctor.
From 1903 it is ‘The Orgy’. “It is actually a title that has been given a posteriori. In the catalogs, in the original provisions of Valle, it bears the title of ‘Panneau’ which means panel or poster. Over time it was called ‘The Orgy’ because it has similar drawings called ‘After-dinner orgies’. Here you can see bottles that could refer to cider. It represents a whole table with food and drink, pots that are expelling steam and from that steam the figures emerge. Valle has several compositions of this style: a real shot and an imaginary one. We are talking about the time when he works on El Greco ”explains Piquer.
This is just one of the Valle paintings we talked about in magazine number 202, the full report can be consulted on the following page:
