Painter · 1843-1909
Painter
Manuel González Méndez was a painter born in Santa Cruz de La Palma in 1843 and deceased in Barcelona in 1909. Trained in Tenerife and Paris, he combined portraiture, genre painting and monumental decoration, and developed a decisive part of his career between the French capital and the Canary Islands.
After his early studies in La Palma, he continued his training at the Provincial Academy of Fine Arts in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. From 1870 he studied at the School of Decorative Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, where Léon Gérôme was his teacher. The French capital became his main workplace, although he kept making periodic visits to Spain and the Canary Islands.
His output includes portraits, landscapes, genre scenes and decorative painting. Drawing and colour underpin works in which observation of Canarian figures and settings coexists with the academic training received in Paris. Campesino de Garafía, dedicated to Benito Pérez Galdós, is among the works associated with his attention to the island's rural world.
At the beginning of the 20th century he returned to Tenerife to hold the chair of Modelling and Decorative Composition at the Municipal School of Drawing. In 1902 he received the commission for two large paintings for the then Provincial Council of the Canary Islands, now in Parliament's Plenary Hall: La Fundación de Santa Cruz and La entrega de las princesas. He died in Barcelona in 1909 after a final visit to Paris.
