Higinio Montalvo Y Sastre (1815-?) - The Kitchen / The Rogue Cat

Oil on canvas. Higinio Montalvo trained with his son Bartolomé, painter of the bedroom of Fernando VII, and learned his trade with the most illustrious Spanish neoclassical bodegonista after the insurmountable Luis Egidio Meléndez, in Madrid at the beginning of the 19th century. His pictorial career, which ended with him becoming a pioneer of photographic excellence in Spain in the 1850s, offered magnificent testimonies of the nascent realism that gave way to classicism with the Pauline irruption of 10th-century trends. This exquisite kitchen workshop is in the tradition of the late Baroque, with its circular base on which the scene is inscribed and a Greco-Roman ruin in the distance, as well as the charismatic and friendly cat of the second term, which cannot be spoken of until the spectacle of those who will be ready to cook. The old woman cooking, abandoned and supported by her daughter, brings us back to the vision of the painting in a conceptual game of great intellectual depth. Higinio Montalvo (1815-?) established himself as a fundamental and pioneering figure in the intersection of art and technology in the 19th-century Spanish landscape. A visionary artist, his trajectory marked the history of the image. Born in a remote village in Segovia at the beginning of the century, Montalvo, a painter by training, followed the 18th-century tradition and transcended the limitations of the genre to embrace the revolutionary technique of photography. He became one of the first great masters to understand this new medium not as a mere mechanical tool, but as a new art form with expressive potential. His work, which includes intimate portraits and character portraits, along with comprehensive urban and landscape views, constitutes an aesthetic bridge between the 19th-century pictorial tradition and modernity. By combining the luminous sensitivity of the painter with the technical precision of the photographer, Montalvo not only documented a time of profound change in Spain, but also elevated photography to the status of a legitimate art, opening an essential path for subsequent generations and ensuring its progress, as an undisputed master of Spanish visual culture. - Image dimensions without marking: 88 x 87.5 cm / 102 x 102 cm with elegant antique marking.