Gitana (con Guantes) con Perro

Ignacío Zuloaga y Zabaleta was honored with the designation to represent Spain at the Venice Biennale in 1938, an indication of the high esteem the artist was held in by his countrymen toward the end of his life. As an 18 year old, he relocated to Paris and there fell in to the circles of circles of Gauguin, van Gogh, Mallarmé, Degas, Rodin, and Toulouse-Lautrec and earned a reputation for his avant-garde style of painting. While his early career centered largely on society portraits, Zuloaga traveled between Spain and Paris and developed a lifelong passion for subjects of distinctly Spanish character – bullfighters, gypsies, and dancers and exhibited in major exhibitions in both countries. The present lot and lot 26 were both conceived during these years. He was greatly influenced the Spanish literary movement Generación del 98, and later returned to Spain permanently in the mid-1920s.
Zuloaga saw himself painting within the great tradition of Spanish art that had been broken with the death of Goya in 1828, a style indebted to the color and mood of Velázquez and Zurbarán. In the context of his modern contemporaries, his style was uniquely his own, evoking powerful and mischievous characters in whirling colors. He said, ‘Go ahead! Paint the way you want, no second thoughts, no timidity’ (E. La Fuente Ferrari, op. cit., p. 13).
George and Hester Fearing of Boston were avid collectors and, along with advocates like John Singer Sargent who championed his Zuloaga's exhibition in 1909, were instrumental in Zuloaga’s rising international profile. The Fearing family commissioned several portraits of family members from the artist and both works by Zuloaga in this sale have remained in the collection of that same family for over a century.