Juan Sánchez Cotán
| Juan Sánchez Cotán | |
|---|---|
Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, 1602, San Diego Museum of Art
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| Born |
Juan Sánchez Cotán June 25, 1560 Orgaz, near Toledo. |
| Died | September 8, 1627 (aged 67) Granada , Spain |
| Nationality | Spanish |
| Known for | Painting bodegones |
Juan Sánchez Cotán (June 25, 1560 – September 8, 1627) was a Spanish Baroque painter, a pioneer of realism in Spain. His still lifes—also called bodegones—were painted in an austere style, especially when compared to similar works in the Netherlands and Italy.
Sánchez Cotán was born in the town of Orgaz, near Toledo, Spain. He was a friend and perhaps pupil of Blas de Prado, an artist famous for his still lifes whose mannerist style with touches of realism the disciple developed further. Cotán began by painting altarpieces and religious works. For approximately twenty years, patronized by the city’s aristocracy, he pursued a successful career as an artist in Toledo painting religious scenes, portraits and still lifes. These paintings found a receptive audience among the educated intellectuals of Toledo society. Sánchez Cotán executed his notable still lifes around the beginning of the seventeenth century, before the end of his secular life. An example (seen above right) is Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (1602, in the San Diego Museum of Art).
On August 10, 1603, Sanchez Cotán, then in his forties, closed up his workshop at Toledo to renounce the world and enter the Carthusian monastery Santa Maria de El Paular. He continued his career painting religious works with singular mysticism. In 1612 he was sent to the Granada Charterhouse; he decided to become a monk, and in the following year he entered the Carthusian monastery at Granada as a lay brother. The reasons for this are not clear, though such action was not unusual in Cotán’s day.
Cotán was a prolific religious painter whose work, carried out exclusively for his monastery, reached its peak about 1617 in the cycle of eight great narrative paintings that he painted for the cloister of the Granada Monastery. These depict the foundation of the order of St. Bruno, and the prosecution of the monks in England by the Protestants. Although the painter’s religious works have an archaic air, they also reveal a keen interest in the treatment of light and volume, and in some respects are comparable with certain works by the Italian Luca Cambiaso, whom Cotán knew at the Escorial.
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Wikipedia