Artworks

 Carlos Vázquez Úbeda (fig. 1) was one of the best known and most successful Spanish painters of

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was born at Ciudad Real. His father, the son

of a general, was a notary and his mother, Matilde Úbeda, from whom he took his last name, was

his first teacher of drawing. He then studied in Madrid at the Escuela de Bellas Artes beginning in

1886, but soon went to Paris where he worked for four years under the academic painter Léon

Bonnat, who, since he had trained in Madrid, favored Spanish students. Vázquez began exhibiting

at the Paris Salon in 1893. His works were very favorably received, as there still existed in France

a taste for all things Spanish. Forsaking landscapes, Vázquez focused in great part on portraying

indigenous Spaniards, especially those from the Valley of Ansó, a remote area in the Pyrenees

Mountains between Pamplona and Huesca, where the people wore picturesque, old-fashioned

costumes. These regional genre subjects (figs. 2-7), including gypsies and flamenco dancers, won

him medals and fame. In 1898 the painter returned to Spain and settled in Barcelona. There he

frequented the literary café Els Quatre Gats made famous by the presence of the younger artists

Pablo Picasso, Ramon Casas, and Santiago Ruisiñol. But Vázquez was also friendly with such

contemporaries as Joaquin Sorolla, who was best man at his wedding. In addition to his genre

paintings, Vázquez produced book illustrations, posters, and did some portraits, including in 1926

one of King Alfonso XIII (figs. 8a-b). In 1914 Vázquez was elected a corresponding member

of New York’s Hispanic Society of America, where two of his works were presented by its

founder, Archer M. Huntington, – The Honeymoon in the Valley of Anso,  of 1911, which had won

a gold medal at the Paris Salon, and a Self-Portrait  of 1913 (figs. 9-10).1  He never travelled to

America, but his 1908 painting The Mother in Law  (fig. 7a) was acquired by William Randolph

Hearst, and that same year Going to the Fair at Salamanca  (fig. 7b) was shown in the San

Francisco World’s Fair. Vázquez spent his long career in Spain and France, where he was made a

member of the Legion of Honor, and he continued to work assiduously until his death while

painting in his studio on August 31, 1944.

The present impressive painting, which rightly may be called Vázquez’s masterpiece, was

executed and exhibited in Madrid in 1906. It gained the artist the appointment as Caballero de la

Orden de Alfonso XII , and it was shown the next year at the Paris Salon. There the title had

appended to it a French translation – “gendarmes Catalans ” – and it earned him a silver medal.

According to several sources, the painting was acquired by the French State for the Musée de

Luxembourg.2  Writing in the Salon review in the Gazette de Beaux Arts , where the work was

illustrated, André Pératé noted the realistic landscape background and described the subject as “the

gendarmes Catalans  escorting a friendly couple of rogues of whom the faces are a poem, no less

than their vividly colored costumes.” The critic seems to have missed the rather pointed,

underlying message of discrimination which is being portrayed here. Set before the mountainous

landscape of Barcelona, the scene shows three pompous mozos  (policemen), in their overly

elaborate uniforms and with their weapons prominent, who have caught two gypsy smugglers and

seem to be either escorting them out of town or taking them to jail followed by their sad dog.

These Mozos de Escudara,  who were themselves often gypsies,  were a special police force that

had existed since the 18th  century for the express purpose of dealing with gypsies.3

 Joaquin Ciervo in his brief 1932 monograph on the artist chose to provide for the

painting a little scenario. He described the arrested gypsies as from Alcala – the man

“sullen and impassive like a pharaoh;” the woman, a pickpocket, who utters untranslatable curses

in gypsy argot.4  The two gypsies are at the center of the composition and look directly out at the

viewer with grim expressions. The dark skinned man, a cigarette dangling in his mouth, carries a

bag possibly concealing his loot. The intense woman in her brilliantly patterned dress holds her

sombrero by her side. Her yellow scarf is flamboyantly wound around her neck. Like Carmen, she

seems someone not to be trifled with!

According to the entry on Vázquez Úbeda in the Enciclopedia Universal Illustrada , the

year after entering the collection of the French State, this painting was sent to an exhibition in

Buenos Aires, Argentina.5  Apparently it was never returned to France, as it appears sometime later

in an Argentinian collection. At the same time as he painted this large work, the artist also

produced a small pastel of the subject (fig. 11).6  Then in 1937, probably for an extensive

retrospective exhibition of his work held that year in Norway, Vázquez painted a smaller,

somewhat less detailed oil version of the composition (fig. 12), perhaps using the earlier pastel as

his model. This later version has been titled either La gitana presa (The Arrested Gypsies)  or La

detenida (The Detainees) .7  Dating from the same time is also another variation of the theme,

which shows just a gypsy woman with a dog detained by the two Catalan policemen (fig. 13).8

 Vázquez’s paintings, with their attention to the details of traditional garb worn by rural types may

recall the folkloric paintings by his fellow Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga, but, as he shows in

this work, he was able to add an element of social commentary to the purely ethnographic

elements.

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