ALBERTO Gustaf Aristides Edelfelt. Finnish painter. 1854-1905 - Realism. Virgil GARRIDO.San LARIN PARASKE. Heading
blog: NÄKÖALA KAUKOLAN HARJULTA.
From a wealthy family of Swedish ancestry, the Finnish painter Albert Gustaf Aristides Edelfelt (1854-1905), had started with fifteen years studying painting at the School of the Finnish Art Society, and without his twenties he was a disciple of Adolf von Becker in the drawing room at the University of Helsinki. Edelfelt's career progressed at a good pace when at that age in Paris attending the workshop of Jean-Léon Gérôme, sharing study with the American painter Julian Alden Weir, who would present in the artistic circles of his countrymen. In the workshops of the French capital admired Velázquez and the English school, teachers and Bonnat, Carolus-Duran and Gérôme himself imbued in their students a visual virtual reality in which the idea of \u200b\u200bpainting as representation technique, worked to exhaust sensitive boundaries between reality and fiction.
DAY OF REST.
One of the revolutions of the nineteenth century was the emergence and development of photography, and English masters like Velazquez were referred to the same which pioneered this way of seeing. The trip to Spain to discuss their works in the Prado, became in the last decades of that century in a general fashion between artists and fans. The lack of funding prevented Edelfelt meet plans to travel to Madrid together with his partner John Singer Sargent in 1879, but it would take long to appear for the right moment, because in the spring of 1881, thanks to a scholarship granted Finnish Art Society, arrived in Madrid with his comrades Boit Edward Darling, and Albert Noël.
PORTRAIT DE JEUNE FEMME.
Like many others, Edelfelt had built an image of Spain made to fit common stereotypes readings and then to the European imagination, in what might be called a romantic. English roads, well beaten at that stage of the century by British, American, French, German, Italian and some other, had led to books in all these languages, describing pictures and souvenirs as abstractions of an experience of contrasts between real and imagined. Stories were based on the equivalence of the images and words, many of them written by artists, and as an experience, something visually demonstrable. One of those painters, Swedish Egron Lundgren, published with two decades away their memories of Spain, in 1870, in the guise of a romantic vision, like his own drawings Edelfelt well known, the ladies and gypsies, dancers, architecture and scenic landscapes, or the old English charts . Nordic artists as the writer Hans Christian Andersen, who also preceded Danish architects Mehldahl Kornerup and had passed through the English streets as he had left Lundgren, and had published their stories. But the influence and memory of the artist's imagination reaching the Swedes Anders Zorn, Ernst Josephson, who following the footsteps of their compatriots Hugo Birger and Dietrichs Sören, formed colony in Seville in 1880 and 1881. These, in Granada would take in marriage the daughters of José Gadea, the owner of the Seven Floors Fonda, the same where he stayed ten years before Fortuny and all his party at the walls of the Alhambra.
PORTRAIT OF MV-GEIROT DYAKOVSKAYA.
Finns Nordic would be the last to arrive in Spain, a country built late in the itineraries of the Grand Tour. From another in turn protected by the Russian crown of solvents ideas of liberalism rampant in Europe, something looked like the English. It was not the only rising Swedish English Edelfelt instance, as in the Parisian environment that directly came from, where English was the leading symptom, joined the rising of his own master Becker, based in Paris, had spent nearly three months of 1863 in Madrid artists copying the Prado, Murillo, Ribera, Cano, Velazquez. Although Spain was considered in their culture, reality and tables, though present, antiquated, warned in his painting features a modern attitude, giving contemporary values \u200b\u200bto the works of old masters. In this environment, many students Couture, Gérôme, Carolus-Duran, made the trip Spain and the study of the paintings in the Prado, an essential part of their training. Among them young Edelfelt be the first Finn to make this trip at length.
THE BOAT.
Edelfelt was not a romantic use of old, we do not see any Orientalist fever touched, even in Spain seeing what lay before her eyes, her imagination flew over the features vivid sights and scenes as repeatedly perceived the artists, giving the pictures made. It is rather a painter than willing to drink "a long sip all that beauty, try to see the intimacy of things so clearly in sight, all that sort of public domesticity where art and life merge into a single level of representation. Visiting the National Exhibition in Madrid repaired in the inferiority of art to do justice to the English: "
What is this Spain painted lower than seen, the real! At the end of the art is a poor caricature of nature, after all, pretty boring to watch, " . Who, here he had visited Granada, Seville and Toledo, working little, but enjoying the experience visual was offered. In Toledo, Edelfelt finally regains hunch painter. It was a city where the visual spectacle is still giving, but in a transcended space and time, floating in the void of his time in detention, with which the artist made clear their affinity:
"In Toledo I spent ten of the most extraordinary days of my life. " GIRL KNIT SOCKS.
Haikko JETTY IN THE Moonligth.
BRIDGE IN THE WOODS.
Letters the traveler goes to his mother, Alexandra Edelfelt, and his friend Otto Berndt Schauman Finnish intellectual, subject and body are studied documentary
the book "Letters of Travel Spain" . They reflected the coordinates of your English experience, the interests of the artist as such, and the facts of your sensitive and human vicissitude. In Toledo acquaintance of the painter Mathias Moreno, professor of drawing the Provincial Institute, and teacher trained in the family workshop by Federico de Madrazo. Incardinated an artist, despite his exile in Toledo, in a cosmopolitan atmosphere that crosses their paths to the artistic life of the English in Paris, which often involved, with the corresponding interactions of both worlds. A Moreno were conducted to more frequently by artists as "the only painter of the city," and in his workshop in Toledo, who arrived Astruc, Carolus-Duran or perhaps Sargent, Edelfelt would warn some as a sentiment shared by light and images the old city was vicar.
KOIVUJENALLA BJÖRKARNA UNDER (UNDER THE BIRCH.) the painter's sister.
SÄRKKÄ.
In Toledo, to Matias Moreno and the writer, compiler of local legends, Eugene de Olavarria, check Edelfelt immersion in English life. Attend the evening of their courtyards, where people sing and dance, as one makes the pilgrimage of the Virgen del Valle, and lives with members of an opera company that will help in the grooming of the young model in Toledo, which portrait has undertaken to perform. It also considers the dramatic effect of Gothic tracery, still incomplete and dilapidated, San Juan de los Reyes, the scene so dear to his host Moreno, that the appearance of groups of beggars in the streets and patios are available, if not harass visitors, and those who rent as models, using some of them to keep out others. Collect raw material for future paintings, he feels, finally, a painter in Spain.
"IN THE NURSERY"
is strange that after all, is of El Greco in the memory of Edelfelt little more than a superficial, although discussed at length, as a painter of genius marred by imbalances, but admirable nonetheless. Or maybe not so strange, because in this merit is some self admiration of faith in an ambiguous way of participating as well Federico de Madrazo that many of his contemporaries and perhaps even Moreno, who first pointed out, and hammered Olavarria, as ardent devotee of the Greek painter who did not stop to consider, however unfortunate crazy. Rather, it seems that his hosts Toledo had not shown a single
Edelfelt Greco in Toledo, contrary to what a few years earlier did with Zacharie Astruc, the pioneer of a devotion that El Greco would soon turn into Paris of the artists.
summer afternoon.
CHILDREN PLAYING ON THE BEACH.
These wicker set its background the excellent book "Letters of Travel in Spain (Ediciones Polyphemus, 2006) Maria del Carmen Díaz de Alda Heikkilä. English correspondence of Edelfelt is preceded by a comprehensive and detailed study on the cultural and historical knowledge of Spain and English art from the perspective of artists and European travelers, especially nineteenth-century Scandinavia, by Maria del Carmen Diaz de Alda Heikkilä, who also translated the letters and documents of the painter. The English-Edelfelt imagination is wonderfully reflected in a small annex where we find graphic pictures of Edelfelt and Moreno, images and sketches from Toledo and the Andalusian patios, Callejón, gents and pictures, Recuerdos from Spain.
Text of Jose Pedro Muñoz Herrera in
http://informes.patrimoniohistoricoclm.es/notas.html Fuentes: La anterior and
http://eldibujante.blogspot.com/
MORNING. 
