Tito Salas

Biography

In 1911, for the centenary of Venezuelan independence, a twenty-four-year-old painter arrived in Caracas from Paris with a large triptych about Simón Bolívar. Today the triptych is in the Federal Legislative Palace, the seat of the National Assembly.

Británico Antonio Salas Díaz was born on 8 May 1887 in Caracas. He became known as Tito Salas later. His father, José Antonio Salas, was according to some accounts a photographer and according to others one of the first brewery owners in the country; his mother was Dolores Díaz. Tito began studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Caracas under Emilio Mauri (the surname appears in some sources as Maury). In 1901 and 1902 he received prizes for painting, when he was fourteen and fifteen. At seventeen he won the academy’s annual competition with the painting “The Blacksmiths” (Los herreros). The prize included a scholarship, and in 1905 Salas went to Paris. In France he enrolled at the Académie Julian, where Jean-Paul Laurens and Lucien Simon taught, and he also studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He seems to have taken readily to Simon’s manner: his genre scenes of that period, crowded with figures, are described as sombre and somewhat morbid. In 1906 his work was accepted at the Salon of French Artists, and he received an honourable mention for the painting “By the Sea” (Au bord de la mer). A year later the same Salon awarded him a third gold medal for “The Feast of San Gennaro”, painted in Italy. In 1907–1908 Salas travelled in Spain and brought back a series of works showing popular scenes and customs. In 1910 he won a gold medal at the World’s Fair in Brussels.

He returned to Venezuela as a painter with international awards. The triptych he brought in 1911 covers three episodes from Bolívar’s life. Which ones, the sources report differently: in one list they are the lessons of Andrés Bello, the oath in Rome and the lonely death at Santa Marta, while in a quotation from the writer Arturo Uslar Pietri the oath on the Aventine Hill, the crossing of the Andes and the death of the Liberator are mentioned. I suspect these are discrepancies in retelling rather than two different compositions, but I cannot check this against the canvases themselves.

Bolívar remained Salas’s main subject for decades. He painted large canvases about his life, and they came to adorn the National Pantheon, the Birthplace of the Liberator in Caracas (the house where Bolívar was born) and Miraflores Palace, the president’s residence. He is regarded as the chronicler of the Bolivarian epic in murals: wall paintings and large canvases for public buildings hold a central place in his legacy.

Salas lived in Petare, a suburb of Caracas, in an old colonial-style house called El Toboso, between the Guaire River and the Baloa bridge. For his relatives, friends and the parish church of that town he painted works on popular and religious subjects of Venezuela.

In 1970, shortly before his death, he painted for the presidential residence La Casona in Caracas the picture “Los Causahabientes” (The Successors), showing the presidents of Venezuela who governed in the nineteenth century. Tito Salas died on 18 March 1974 in Caracas.