Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Ensueño [The Dream]

Image caption
MATEO INURRIA

Ensueño [The Dream]

  • 1922
  • Patinated bronze
  • 49 x 50 x 59 cm
  • Cat. E_24
  • Acquired in 1936
  • Observations: There is a marble original at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando of Madrid.
By:
Isabel Tejeda

Mateo Inurria produced The Dream (1922) near the end of his life, as a summary of his aesthetic ethos linked to modernism. He donated the first version of the sculpture the artist from Cordoba as his “acceptance speech” on joining the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando on 26 March 1922. In this, he revived an earlier tradition of the Academy in which new members presented a work in lieu of an opening speech. This explains why the piece is also known as My Speech. The bronze depicts a young female nude – the sculpture stops under the rise of her breast – resting her cheek on her right arm in a melancholic way. Even though there is a clear idealisation of the features, it could well be a portrait. Her gently wavy hair is parted in the middle and tied in a bun low on her nape, a fairly common hairstyle in the 1920s. The sculpture is an organic part of the pedestal on which it stands.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Mateo Inurria
Cordoba 1867 - Madrid 1924

Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño writes that Mateo Inurria merged the legacy of modernisation of the influential Auguste Rodin in France with official discourses. He thus came up with work halfway between naturalism and idealisation. Inurria trained at his father’s industrial sculpture workshop at the Cordoba Fine Arts School, run by the father of Julio Romero de Torres, whom Inurria would later teach. He went on to study at the Madrid Fine Arts School from 1883 to 1885, and was granted a stipend by Cordoba Provincial Council. He also worked as a restorer at the Mosque/Cathedral of Cordoba and at the Medina Azahara site. At the end of the century he travelled through France and Italy, on a journey that proved very fruitful for his subsequent artistic development. Inurria moved to Madrid in 1913.

He undertook many public commissions, such as the equestrian statute of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba (known as the ‘Great Captain’) in Las Tendillas square in Cordoba (for which he used the bullfighter Lagartijo as his model). An unusual feature of this statue is that he used two materials -bronze and marble- in the same piece, with the marble being used for the figure. This sculpture, which is very well-known in the town, clearly drew from Renaissance equestrian statues. Also in his home-town of Cordoba, he produced a statue of politician Antonio Barroso (1917) which is no longer standing. In Madrid he made the Monument to Eduardo Rosales (1916) and some allegorical figures for the Monument to Alfonso XII in El Retiro Park (1905), plus a sculpture dedicated to Lope de Vega (1902).

Inurria was awarded the First Place Medal in the 1899 National Exhibition for his The Coal Mine high relief and an Honorary Medal in the 1920 National Exhibition for Form. The Education and Science Ministry held an anthological exhibition of his work in Madrid in 1968 and Cordoba City Council staged a retrospective in 2007.

Isabel Tejeda

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 1.