Ricardo Baroja

Ricardo Baroja y Nessi (12 January 1871 – 19 December 1953) was a Spanish Basque painter, writer and engraver. As an engraver, he is considered the successor of Francisco Goya. He was the brother of the novelist Pío Baroja and writer/ethnologist Carmen Baroja. Carmen was the mother of anthropologist Julio Caro Baroja and director/screenwriter Pío Caro Baroja.

Ricardo's father, Serafin Baroja, was a mining engineer and the itinerant nature of his profession caused Ricardo to be born in Minas de Río Tinto, in the Province of Huelva, an ancient mining village since the time of the Phoenicians in Andalusía. Soon after his birth the Río Tinto Mines were sold to a consortium from the United Kingdom and Australia, the Rio Tinto Group, and so the family returned to San Sebastián.

In 1879, when Ricardo was eight, the family moved to Madrid, but two years later, they were living on the banks of the Río Arga in Pamplona, and they were in Bilbao in 1886. At fifteen, Ricardo attended the Polytechnic School of Engineering in Madrid in an attempt to follow in his father's career as a mining engineer. While there, he had an attack of tuberculosis, a disease from which his elder brother, Dario (1869–1894), was suffering.

Alarmed, his parents withdrew him from the school so he could recover. Later, following his love for art he studied museology at the Cuerpo de Archivos y Bibliotecas (1888–1891) so that he could work in museums. He also attended a painting academy studying with Eugene Vivó. In 1890 he travelled to the art circles of Málaga and València and was inspired by the older painters Francisco Domingo Marqués and Ignacio Pinazo Camarlench. At Valencia, he met the painter Julio Peris Brell with whom he struck up a lifelong friendship. In 1894, he went to Madrid to help his maternal aunt, Juana Nessi, run her bakery after the death of her husband, Mattias Lacasa.

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