ZULOAGA, IGNACIO ), Spanish painter, was born at Eibar in the Basque country on July 26, 1870, the son of the metal-worker and damascener Placido Zuloaga, and grand son of the organizer and director of the royal armoury in Madrid. He was intended for an architect, and to this end was sent to Rome, where he at once followed his strong impulse to become a painter. After six months' work he completed his first picture, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1890. Continuing his studies in Paris, he was strongly influenced by Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. But his true style developed after his return to Spain, when he had studied the work of Velazquez, Zurbaran, El Greco and Goya. His own country was slow in acknowledging the young artist whose strong, decorative, rugged style was the very negation of the aims of such well-known modern Spanish artists as Fortuny, Madrazo and Benlliure. It was in Paris, and
then in Brussels and other continental art centres, that Zuloaga was first hailed by the reformers as the regenerator of Spanish national art and as the leader of a school. He is now represented in almost every great continental gallery.
Two of his canvases are at the Luxembourg, one at the Brussels Museum ("Avant la Corrida") , and one ("The Poet Don Miguel") at the Vienna Gallery. The Pau Museum owns an interesting portrait of a lady, the Barcelona Municipal Museum the important group "Amies," the Venice Gallery, "Madame Louise"; the Berlin Gallery, "The Topers." Other examples are in the Budapest, Stuttgart, Ghent and Posen galleries and in many important private collections.
A fully illustrated account of the artist and his work, by M. Utrillo, was published in a special number of Forma (Barcelona, 1907).