BRINGING HERITAGE CLOSER. THE BAZTAN VALLEY: MEN, ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPE

21 September 2006

The Bidasoa school and landscape painting in Baztania
Dr. Francisco Javier Zubiaur Carreño. Museum of Navarra

Mirando Lecaroz. Echenique

Landscape is the genre that in Spain will lead the change from romantic to modern aesthetics, stimulated by the regional centers of painting that are mostly located in the peninsular periphery, if we exclude the important teaching of Carlos de Haes at the School of San Fernando, in Madrid, since 1857. The pre-impressionist School of Barbizon (France) will help to establish a form of work that will be adopted by colonies of painters, also in Spain, seduced by beautiful and uncontaminated places, around rivers or the coastline, where to paint in the open air, but especially attracted by the charisma of one or more painters who establish with the others ties of teaching. In the lecture we analyze these schools and the conditions that throughout recent history have been given in its training, with special attention to the School of Bidasoa.

The Bidasoa School arose at the mouth of the river that gives it its name between 1895 and 1919, remaining active until the end of the 20th century, at least, when its main promoter, the painter Gaspar Montes Iturrioz, died. Throughout its development, the staggered presence of the painters Darío de Regoyos (in Irún), Daniel Vázquez Díaz (in Fuenterrabía) and Ricardo Baroja (in Vera de Bidasoa) was recorded on the banks of the river. The School was formed in Irun under the protection of favorable circumstances - an educational and cultural infrastructure, the French influence and liberalism in attitudes - although its effects are projected over the entire basin of the river, which in part of its course through Navarre receives the name of Baztan.

The lecture contemplates the different generations of painters existing in each one of the stretches of this Navarre-Gipuzkoa river and bordering with France, taking as reference letter its main towns: Fuenterrabía-Irún, Bera and Elizondo. The relationships between the painters are analyzed, but above all the particular aesthetics of each one.

It is concluded that the towns of Bera and Elizondo can be considered as secondary in this School, although they were visited by all of them in search of sensations to capture in their paintings. Finally, Baztan landscape painting is considered in detail.