Juan Francisco González

Biography

The boy was fourteen when he was taken to Pedro Lira. Lira, already a well-known Chilean painter, advised sending the youngster to the Academy of Painting.

Juan Francisco González Escobar was born on 25 September 1853 in Santiago, the son of José González and Mercedes Escobar. He grew up in Recoleta, a neighbourhood at the foot of Cerro Blanco hill, where the family ran a business in goods imported from Ecuador. His first drawing lessons came from Manuel Tapia. In 1869, at sixteen, he entered the academy, where his teachers were Ernst Kirchbach and Juan Mochi. By some accounts he also studied at the Instituto Nacional. His early manner differed little from that of his teachers. In 1879 he travelled to Peru and Bolivia, and from 1884 he lived in Valparaíso and for about eleven years taught drawing at the boys’ lyceum; he was invited to the post by the rector, Eduardo de la Barra. In that same year, 1884, he won third medal at the Salón de Santiago, in 1890 second medal at the Salón Oficial, and in 1900 first medal.

The turning point was Europe. By some accounts his first trip took place in 1887 and the second in 1897: Paris, Florence, Venice, Madrid, Seville, Morocco. He studied Spanish realism of the seventeenth century, the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, and the painters of the Barbizon school. On his travels he visited Spain, Italy, England, France and Germany; in France he discovered Impressionism and felt it to be his own: the interest in light, in landscape, in small canvases. In 1904 he met the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla, with whom he remained friends, and taught painting courses in Munich, Frankfurt and Nuremberg. The dates of the trips differ between accounts, and I would not treat them as final.

After returning to Chile in 1906 he gave a lecture at the University of Chile, and his name became known after it. He was invited to teach at the School of Fine Arts, where he taught sketching and life drawing; by some accounts he became a professor in 1910. His pupils are said to include Joaquín Fabres, Pedro Prado, Alfredo Helsby and Pedro Reszka. In 1915 he joined Los Diez (“The Ten”), a group of artists, poets and intellectuals, and in 1919 he became head of the executive committee of the National Society of Fine Arts.

He told his students that one could paint well only after learning to observe and to be moved by the colours and forms of nature, whether or not a picture was exact in its details. Among his recorded sayings are these: to draw is to express, one draws as one writes, and one should write as one thinks. Art, in his view, proceeds by synthesis, not by analysis.

After leaving teaching he again painted for himself. He rendered flowers and Chilean fruit with calm, confident strokes, in thick paint with a rough texture, and his hand is easy to recognise in them. He sought freer expression and experimented with his materials: he achieved, for example, such transparency in oil that it resembled watercolour. His favourite subjects remained the peasant corner, adobe houses and flowers. Some canvases are tiny, yet they convey the smell and taste of the fruit. His influence is seen in the “Generation of 1913” (the Generación del 13) and in the Montparnasse group. In 1925 the young artists of the renewal, who leaned towards Cubism and Fauvism, themselves invited him to their exhibition. His works are held in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, which mounted a retrospective of his work in 1953 and a solo exhibition in 1976.

González died in Santiago on 4 March 1933. In 1983, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, the Instituto Cultural de Providencia in Santiago held an exhibition in his honour.