Ramón Torres Méndez

Biography

Ramón Torres Méndez painted his first portraits on ivory, which he got by sawing up billiard balls. He never finished school: there was not enough money in the family, and all his education amounted to what his father could teach him.

He was born in Bogotá on 29 August 1809, the son of José Eugenio Torres and Antonia Méndez. In 1824, at the age of fifteen, he began work at the printing house of Jayme Cowie and took part in producing the newspaper El Constitucional, in English and Spanish. He taught himself to draw. In 1837 he was admitted to the engraving school founded by Antonio Lefevre at the Colombian mint; miniatures and a “Portrait of a Man”, now in the National Museum of Colombia, date from the same year.

In 1830 Torres Méndez joined the army as a volunteer and fought in the war with Venezuela. At the Battle of El Santuario on 27 August he received a lance wound, fortunately not a dangerous one.

In 1834 he opened a studio and began working on commission, mostly painting portraits. Of the works from those years, “Portrait of a Lady” survives, also in the National Museum of Colombia. On 19 April 1840, in Guayatá, he married María Coleta Medina Morales. They had eight children. In 1844 he exhibited the painting “Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene” at the School of Fine Arts and won a prize for it. In 1847 and 1848 he showed work at the exhibitions of the Society of Drawing and Painting, where he also taught; in 1848 the newspaper El Neogranadino, edited by Manuel Ancízar, announced him as a portrait painter.

The main business of his life became scenes of popular life. He drew street vendors, peasants, festivals, brawls and outings to the countryside, recording costumes, occupations and customs with an accuracy that still serves historians as a source. The first plate of the series was published on 1 May 1849. In 1850 a Paris printer, Delarue, issued the first European edition of “Costumbres neogranadinas”, and in 1851 the plates came out monthly in Bogotá as lithographs by the brothers Celestino and Jerónimo Martínez. He himself lithographed only one known work: “Ejército del Norte” (1855), commemorating Mosquera’s victory in 1854, and even that together with Celestino Martínez. In 1857 Isaac Holton’s book “New Granada: Twenty Months in the Andes” was published in New York, with thirteen of his drawings of everyday life. Later editions circulated widely: in 1910, for the centenary of independence, an “Álbum de costumbres colombianas” was printed in Leipzig.

In 1861, when religious communities were expelled from the country, Torres Méndez gathered in one gallery more than seventy colonial paintings from their monasteries. In this way the pictures were saved from destruction. Later, in 1867, he was elected a teacher at the School of Arts and Crafts, and then transferred to teach botany at the School of Natural Sciences. In 1871, at the National Exhibition of 20 July, he showed “El paseo campestre” (an outing to the countryside), “Bathing Nymphs”, “The Virgin of Mercy” and portraits; for his portrait of Archbishop Herrán he received an honourable mention.

In 1883 he sent to Caracas the watercolour “Allegorical Apotheosis of the Liberator Simón Bolívar” and sat on the jury of a competition announced to mark Bolívar’s birthday and to choose a director for the newly founded Gutiérrez Academy.

Ramón Torres Méndez died in Bogotá on 16 December 1885, in his house in the Las Nieves district. His biography appeared in the Papel Periódico Ilustrado in 1887, and in 1940 the magazine Cromos printed thirty-seven plates based on his drawings.