Daniel Sabater Y Salabert (1888-1951) - Head Study

- Oil on cardboard. Unsigned. - He was born in Valencia on December 13, 1888. At the age of eight, he began to show his inclination for drawing. Not very studious, he left school to go to work for a fan painter and then in a factory. In 1904, he went to Madrid, where, to earn a living, he painted fans commissioned by commercial houses, especially on military themes. His first major commission was a canvas measuring 1.50 by 2 meters, intended for the Santa Cristina de la Moncloa asylum, on the theme "six sad old men grouped around a bare tree", requested by its director Alberto Aguilera. This painting was exhibited at the National in 1910. In 1912, he moved to Paris and painted a large number of portraits of the Venerable Mother and Saint Vincent for the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul, whom they sent to their Missions in China. He then received a small pension and returned to Madrid, where he spent the First World War painting miniatures for antique dealers, which experts and dealers attributed to 18th-century masters. Later, in Barcelona, he held an exhibition of pastel portraits that attracted the attention of critics, who compared him to eminent portraitists, including Béjar. During this period, a ceaseless pictorial excitement took hold of him, causing a profound change in his subject and technique. His palette, until then light and luminous, was reduced in its range to ochres and black. The world appears different when viewed from new perspectives: men with all their defects, their confused feelings and the surrounding injustice with all its baseness and madness. He had a great predilection for painting Christs, Magdalenes, monsters, witches and macabre scenes, in which he put the maximum horror. Every morning he went to the San Pablo Hospital to use as models the corpses of drowned, hanged and starving people, studying the process of their decomposition on successive canvases. This exaltation, which lasted for several months, ended with an exhibition of these works. The Barcelona critics, with a few exceptions, proclaimed the horror that these themes caused them, calling him the "painter of witches", a pseudonym under which he would later become famous throughout the world. This disappointment motivated his maritime exodus, which would be crowned with great triumphs and a vast production distributed among the most important museums and private collections in the American geography. Two of his works are preserved in the Hispanic Society of America in New York. In Cuba, in the National Museum of Havana, they have two canvases, in a gallery: "Head of Christ", "We will all be equal", "The Truth" and "Life and its thorns". Mexico is also the depository of a large part of his productions, both in the capital and in most of its large cities; as in Brazil and Uruguay. She returned to Spain in 1923 and settled in Salamanca, during which time she made a large number of Santa Teresa. In 1928, he returned to Paris, where he stayed for long periods and where he made most of his works. His great capacity and prodigious creative fertility allowed his work to spread throughout Europe and to be introduced into the best collections and museums, such as those of Holland, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and Spain. The cycle of his eventful life ended on September 27, 1951 in Barcelona, leaving humanity, with his art, a message that was sometimes ironic, sometimes apocalyptic; but always with suggestions for reflection to prevail. - Dimensions of the unframed image: 33 x 24 cm - The Montbaron Gallery includes a technical sheet drawn up by a qualified art historian with all its lots. This form is sent in digital format and on request.