Piece of the month of March 2010
A PORTRAIT OF CIGA RECOVERS THE reportOF THE BENEFACTOR SANTIAGO ONDARRA GOICOECHEA
Francisco Javier Zubiaur Carreño
Chairof Navarrese Heritage and Art
Celebrations are a good time to review a museum's collection. Such has been the case with those of the Pamplona painter Javier Ciga Echandi (1877-1960) at the Museum of Navarre, the 50th anniversary of his death.
Under the misnomer degree scroll"Portrait of a politician", an oil painting on canvas measuring 94.5 x 120 cm, with the address signatureJ. CIGA ECHANDI, was inventoried and deposited in the Museum from the Mental Health Service of the Government of Navarre. Painted around 1918, the sitter appears to be about 59 years old. He is wearing a black suit jacket with a velvety collar, the lapels of which reveal a white shirt with a black bow tie. He is standing - the portrait is three-quarter length and frontal, slightly tilted - with his arms outstretched. His right hand rests his knuckles on a wooden table, revealing part of its carved skirt. On it, behind his hand, two books are placed on top of each other. A grazing light coming from our right enlivens the black of the clothes with grey highlights, tempering the portrait with the warm tones of the skin of the hands and face. The figure stands out from the neutral background due to the slight effect of the backlighting coming from the side of the table, where the books - painted in green, ochre and white - add a touch of colour to a truly sober ensemble, grade. On the head, well formed and fleshed out, the facial features denote what appear to be the after-effects of a past stroke or facial paralysis, judging by the dissymmetry of the mouth and chin, and the drooping of the left eyelid.
Santiago Ondarra portrayed by Ciga around 1918.
Photo: Larrión & Pimoulier
The information on his provenance has enabled us, thanks to the partnershipof Dr. José Javier Viñes Rueda, managerfrom his submissionto the Museum of Navarre on 16 July 1986, to identify the sitter as Santiago Ondarra Goicoechea, born in Iturmendi (Navarre) in 1859. He was the son of Cristóbal Ondarra, a landowner, and Celestina Goicoechea, a couple who also had seven other children. The family's wealthy position allowed them to give programs of study, in accordance with the criteria of the time, preferably to their sons: José and Rogelio studied pharmacy and opened an apothecary's shop at issue21 Mercaderes Street in Pamplona. placeEsteban, in addition to studying Pharmacy at degree scroll, also studied Natural Sciences and Medicine, later holding the post of doctor in Bacaicoa, a village in the Barranca region close to his birthplace. Filomena went on to study to become a teacher in Zizur Menor. There is no record at programs of studyof the rest of her siblings: Florencia, Teodora and Miguel Francisco.
Santiago studied Pharmacy between 1881 and 1882, and then Medicine at the Central University of Madrid, starting at doctorate, although he did not go on to work in either of the two professions for which he trained, given his comfortable economic position, which allowed him to devote his efforts to helping others.
From 1924 he was a member of the boardde Gobierno de la Santa Casa de Misericordia, in Pamplona. Likewise partnerof the Library ServicesCatólico Propagandista of the same city, which supported the illustrated magazine La Avalancha, where the obituary of our character was published in one of its issues, so it can be deduced that he was a reader of its pages. The magazine defined itself as anti-liberal and traditionalist, frequently debating the so-called "social question".
He died in Pamplona on 28 September 1932, aged 73. In November 1929 he had overcome a serious illness, perhaps the one that left its mark on his face. His fiduciary heirs Jesús Francisco Fuentes Soria and Juan Sagüés Apesteguía, following his instructions, created and instituted, by deed granted on 15th May 1941 before the notary Juan San Juan, of Pamplona, the permanent Foundation to which they gave the name of "Fundación Ondarra", at reportof the aforementioned Don Santiago, for charitable and social purposes, and with an initial capital of 3,639,119 pesetas.
The board of trusteeswas made up, in addition to the two aforementioned (Juan Sagüés being its President), of the priest Justiniano Arratíbel (Parish Priest of San Nicolás), Rogelio Ondarra Goicoechea (brother of the deceased), and Aniceto Muniain Olagüe (neighbour).
Its first orientation, of subjectsanatorium, was primarily aimed at combating children's bone diseases. For this purpose, a building designed by Víctor Eúsa and built by businessErroz-San Martín was erected in the vicinity of the village of Biurrun, on the southern slopes of the Sierra del Perdón, near Campanas, and the works were officially received in December 1940. The remains of the generous philanthropist Santiago were given a Christian burial in a crypt located there.
It was called "Sanatorio Ondarra". financial aidIt was inaugurated on 26th July 1944 and Dr. Juan Lite Blanco was appointed as its first director , with the help of the Campanas doctor García Remón, the service of the Daughters of Charity and the chaplaincy at positionof the curate of the parish of San Nicolás de Pamplona, Mr. Clemente Fernández. Clemente Fernández.
The desired effects were fully achieved, above all, through rest, fresh air, sunshine and food. So in 1958, as bone tuberculosis was considered to have disappeared with the appearance of treatments using hydracides, it was decided to give the Foundation another orientation within its charitable-social purpose. Thus, on 25th January 1958, the new board of trusteesof the Ondarra Foundation was constituted in which several members of the committeeof Administration of the Caja de Ahorros de Navarra took up the vacant posts, deciding that the Biurrun building would henceforth be used for school camps for children of weak constitution in need of rest and good food, no longer for children with tuberculosis or patients with infectious diseases, as had been the case until then.
Thus, from the summer of 1961, and once the building had been refurbished for the summer residency programwith a capacity for a hundred children, the CAN would be in charge of what was then called the "Fundación Ondarra" School Colony. The Caja undertook to assume the deficit generated by its operation without altering the aims of the Foundation and the spirit of the testator Mr. Santiago Ondarra Goicoechea.
The centre continued this activity until around 1975, when it was placed under the responsibility of the Government of Navarre and was used for the treatment of drug addicts by agreementwith the "El Patriarca" Foundation, an organisation that later disappeared. Subsequently, the building was abandoned and looted. Around 1981, Dr. Viñes, at the time Director General of Health and Social Welfare, managed to recover in extremis, from the old management office, the medical books that belonged to the illustrious benefactor and his degree scrollof graduatein Medicine from the Central University, which went to the collection of the Library ServicesGeneral of Navarre, as well as his portrait, painted by Ciga, now subject to analysis, which went to the Museum of Navarre.
His Library Serviceswas a compendium of the knowledge of the last third of the 19th century, with titles published in Madrid and Barcelona, many of them by French specialists translated into Spanish. It is made up of forty monographs, the Spanish journals of Medicina y Cirugía Prácticas and the Ibero-American Journal of Medical Sciences, as well as several works of a humanistic nature, and can be said to constitute a basic Library Servicesin his medical specialization program.
The subjects covered include hygiene (with treatises by Juan Giné y Partagás, Michel Lévy, Charles Londe. Pedro Felipe Monlau and Luis Pérez Minguez); Anatomyand physiology (with those of Xavier Bichat, Philippe Hutin, Alexandre Jamain and Philibert-Constant Sappey); pathological Anatomy(with the treatise by Eduardo García Solá); surgical pathology (with the texts by Theodor Billroth, John Eric Erichsen, Alphonse Guerin, Wilhelm Roser), internal and therapeutic pathology (by Hermann Eichort, Joseph François Malgaigne, Léon Moynac, and the book by Léon Athanase Gosselin on the surgical internshipat the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris); on skin diseases (the text by Eugène Guibout); forensic medicine and toxicology (those by Diego Aguilera Sánchez and Pedro Mata); paediatrics (Eugène Bouchut); medical Philosophy(Jean Bouillaud); psychiatry (William Alexander Hammond and Pedro Mata); obstetrics (Désiré-Joseph Joulin); and general manuals on therapeutics (by Armand Trousseau, Francisco Javier de Castro and A. García Cuello), internshipmédica (Tomás Santero y Moreno, plus the text of Clínica Médica del Hôtel-Dieu de París by Armand Trusseau); homeopathy (Pedro Mata), and one specific to the centre, the "Tratamiento de la tuberculosis pulmonar" by Juan Manuel Mariani y Larrión. There are some complementary titles on experimental physics and applied meteorology (by Adolphe Ganot), Chemistry(by Ramón Torres Muñoz de Luna) and astronomy (by Augusto T. Arcimis and de Werle), a science of secondary interest to him.
The Ondarra Foundation's healthcare contribution effectively added to the initiative already undertaken by the board of trusteesNacional Antituberculoso which started such children's clinics in the years 1925-1930, redoubling other stimulating actions of private charity in Navarre such as those of Dña. Concepción Benítez (founder in 1913 of the original Provincial Hospital in Barañain), Don Fernando Daoiz (promoter of the Basque-Navarrese Psychiatric Hospital in 1905) and Don Joaquín Ruiz (creator of the Maternity Hospital and Orphanage in Pamplona in 1904).
From an artistic point of view, this portrait by Ciga, executed around 1918, is close in time to the best male portraits painted by him in the 1920s, dedicated to prominent members of the bourgeoisie, representatives of artistic and intellectual culture or professionals in Pamplona society (Primitivo and José Erviti, Eugenio Gortari Polit, Estanislao de Aranzadi, Eugenio del Castillo and the recently discovered portrait of Eustaquio Echauri). All of them are depicted in the arrangement we have already described, with unquestionable elegance staff, and a severity in their posture resulting from a palette reduced to black, grey, the warmest flesh tones and some details, such as the books in this "Portrait of Santiago Ondarra", which situate the figure in relation to his inclinations, details which at the same time diminish some of his characteristic sparseness. The compositional balance, exact drawing and modelling, controlled brushstrokes, delicate chiaroscuro, anatomical detail, general accuracy of the qualities and psychological capture, in line with post-Romantic realism, stand out in this work.
bibliography
Alegría Goñi, C., El pintor J. Ciga, Pamplona, Caja de Ahorros Municipal de Pamplona, 1992.
Zubiaur Carreño, F. J., "Nuevo retrato de Ciga de su época de París, el del periodista y filólogo Eustaquio Echauri Martínez", Príncipe de Viana, 250 (2010), 295-304, Pamplona, Government of Navarre.