Eugenio Lucas the Elder
(Alcalá de Henares 1824 - 1870 Madrid)

Carnival

Oil on canvas
39.9 x 39 cm

Signed lower right E. Lucas
On the verso a label numbered 87

Eugenio Lucas is best known for his Goyaesque genre paintings. His works are marked by energetic, expressive brushwork that seeks to capture the fluidity of light and movement. Goya's palette is more sombre and his brushwork has none of the darting, flickering motion and idiosyncratic squirls of Lucas's work. Also characteristic of Lucas's work is the emphatic pink of the flesh tones of his figures. He was an extraordinarily versatile painter and stands as a key figure in the development of nineteenth-century Spanish painting between Goya and Mariano Fortuny.

Lucas was born in the final years of Goya's life in the university town of Alcalá de Henares near Madrid into a family of modest means. His prodigious talent was quickly recognized and he was encouraged by a wealthy patron from Madrid. He trained at the Royal Academy under Camarón, Juan Madrazo and Tejeo. The great Spanish masters - Velázquez, Murillo and Goya - had a formative influence on his work and he engaged in extensive study, re-creation and imitation of their compositions.

His landscapes and decorative paintings achieved widespread recognition. He exhibited in Madrid for the first time in 1848. He showed two paintings at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 in Paris, one of them a Bullfight he had worked on with the Madrid-based painter Henri Philastre, a French artist. Lucas also collaborated with Philastre on a fresco cycle for the Madrid Opera House. A further public commission was the decorative project for the palace of the Marques de Salamanca.[1]