Higinio Montalvo y Sastre (1815-?) - La Cuisine / Le Chat Voyou

- Oil on canvas.

- Higinio Montalvo was trained by his uncle Bartolomé, a court painter to Fernando VII and perhaps the most distinguished neoclassical still life painter in Spain after the incomparable Luis Egidio Meléndez, in Madrid during the early decades of the 19th century. His painting career, which is interrupted when he becomes an exceptional pioneer of photography in Spain from 1850 onward, leaves behind some magnificent testimonies of the emerging realism that replaces classicism in Spain with the gradual rise of 19th-century trends.

This exquisite kitchen still life is rooted in a late Baroque tradition, featuring a circular plinth framing the scene and a Greco-Roman ruin in the distance, as well as the charismatic and friendly cat in the second plane, which cannot stop licking itself at the spectacle of the birds that will soon be cooked. The elderly cook, toothless and worn by age, returns our gaze from the painting in a conceptual play of great intellectual depth.

Higinio Montalvo (1815-?) emerges as a fundamental and pioneering figure at the intersection of art and technology in 19th-century Spain, a visionary artist whose career positions him as a key character in the history of imagery. Born in a remote Segovian village at the beginning of the century, Montalvo was a painter trained in the 18th-century tradition who transcended the limits of the canvas to embrace the revolutionary technique of photography, becoming one of the first great masters to understand this new medium not as a mere mechanical tool but as a new form of art with expressive potential. His work, ranging from intimate, character-filled portraits to complex urban views and landscapes, serves as an aesthetic bridge between 19th-century painting tradition and modernity. By merging the painter's luminous sensitivity with the photographer's technical precision, Montalvo not only documented a period of profound change in Spain but also elevated photography to a legitimate artistic status, paving an essential path for future generations and securing his place as an undisputed master of Spanish visual culture.

- Image dimensions without frame: 88 x 87.5 cm / 102 x 102 cm with elegant antique framing.

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