Alfredo Valenzuela Puelma

Biography

His first gold medal came in 1877, for the painting “Diego de Almagro in Prison”. The painter was twenty-one.

He was born on 8 February 1856 in Valparaíso, to a family from Santiago who were spending the summer there. He began to draw as a boy; the art historian Ricardo Bindis reports a story that he painted his first picture at ten, with brushes he had made himself. At twelve he entered the Academy of Painting in Santiago, where he studied under Ernesto Kirchbach and then under Giovanni (Juan) Mochi. For a time he also studied medicine, but gave it up; he played the piano well and wrote songs, yet chose painting. A fellow student at the academy, the painter Onofre Jarpa, remembered him as a young man unusually serious for his age. He took criticism badly and preferred to correct himself. In 1878 at the Official Salon in Santiago he won first and second medals, and first medals again in 1880 and 1884. By 1881 he was painting portraits of prominent people, among them the former president Manuel Montt. That same year the government awarded him a scholarship to travel to Europe.

In Paris he briefly enrolled at the School of Fine Arts, but left and became a pupil of Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant. It was probably from him that his interest in Oriental motifs and in a precise, detailed brushstroke came. At anatomy lectures at the Sorbonne he came into contact with the new movements, but what affected him most were the Spanish masters whom he copied in the Louvre. In return for the scholarship he sent paintings to Chile every year: in 1882 a copy of Jules Breton’s “The Gleaner”, now in the Municipal Museum of Fine Arts in Valparaíso, and a year later “The Geography Lesson”, one of his best-known works. “Naiad Near the Water” was shown at the Paris Salon.

Illness brought him back to Chile in 1885, earlier than planned. He brought with him “The Merchant’s Pearl”, which he had titled in French “Marchand d’esclaves” (“Slave Merchant”). The objection was to its subject, not its quality: a nude figure seemed indecent to a conservative society. The painter took the attacks hard. He and Pedro Lira had a long-standing mutual hostility; in the newspaper La Ley he mocked his rival under the pseudonym Pedrolera.

Commissions grew scarce. The writer Eusebio Lillo, author of the words of the Chilean national anthem, helped obtain a pension from President José Manuel Balmaceda, and in 1887 Valenzuela went to Paris again. He studied with Jean-Paul Laurens but, by some accounts, was expelled from the studio after a quarrel; he then made copies and painted interiors. In 1889 he produced “The Cherry Nymph” there: at the Paris Salon it received an honourable mention, and in Madrid the following year a third medal. On his return he won the Marcos Maturana prize in 1892. He painted portraits, landscapes and nudes, but it was chiefly portraits that paid. In the 1890s he lived in Valparaíso, managed the Teatro La Victoria and organised exhibitions; in 1893 he founded the Municipal Museum of Fine Arts there. In 1896 he was awarded first medal at the Valparaíso exhibition. Among his pupils are named Alfredo Helsby and Eucarpio Espinosa, although he did not seek to teach systematically.

It seems to me that to judge him by “The Merchant’s Pearl” alone would be a mistake: the list of his works also includes “The Boy in the Fez”, the portrait of Juan Francisco González, and “My Son Rafael” (1899).

In 1907 he left for France for the last time and never returned. He died on 27 October 1909 in a psychiatric hospital in Villejuif, in poverty. The farewell took place in France; his remains were then taken to Chile, and a solemn ceremony was held in the main hall of the National Museum of Fine Arts.