Maella -Rome, 1851 -1945 · Academic landscape and Italian light

A guardian and her turkeys animate a Roman landscape: La Pavera unites nature study, animal observation and the requirements of the Spanish Academy.

Hermenegildo Estevan y Fernando was born in Maella in 1851 and died in Rome in 1945. After training in Caspe and Zaragoza, notably with Marcelino Unceta, he studied in Madrid with Carlos de Haes and attended the School of Watercolorists. In 1882, he obtained a landscape pension at the Spanish Academy in Rome; he then became secretary for almost half a century. La Pavera, an oil on canvas measuring 78 × 120 cm signed in Rome in 1883, constitutes his second sending as a resident. The regulation required that a landscape include an animal study: turkeys are therefore not an anecdotal addition, but the demonstration of a complete observation of living things. The guardian connects the birds to terrain and gives a human scale to the countryside. The Italian light, depth and precise motifs show how the teaching of Carlos de Haes is transformed through contact with Rome. The "Hermenegildo Estevan" selection notably compares La Pavera. His reading favors the story.

In La Pavera, the academic rule becomes rural poetry: the turkeys required by the program end up giving the landscape its rhythm.