Name Josep i | Died 1872, Barcelona, Spain | |
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Josep Arrau i Barba (4 May 1802, Barcelona - 2 January 1872, Barcelona) was a Catalan painter.
Biography
His father (also named Josep, 1774-1817) was a painter; his grandfather and great-grandfather were sculptors. The French invasion of 1808 forced his parents to leave Barcelona and seek refuge in Reus, where he first displayed talent for drawing. They returned home in 1814 and, the following year, he began studying Latin at the Colegio Tridentino. Soon after, he received his first art lessons from his father, but they were ended after a short time by his father's early death.
He then continued his studies at the Escola de la Llotja and in the workshop of Joan Carles Anglès (?-1822), where he learned architecture and geometry as well as the mechanics of painting. He was at la LLotja From 1819 to 1826, where he received several prizes at their exhibitions. During this time he occasionally took lessons from the sculptor Damià Campeny. Eager to know all he could about everything that related to his art, he took a course in anatomy at the College of Medicine and studied chemistry to understand the composition of paints and the process of restoration. In 1829, the culmination of all this work was a professorship of drawing at the College of the Piarist Schools of Barcelona.
In 1831, he visited Milan, where he took lessons from Giuseppe Molteni. He began by copying Molteni's works, but was soon painting from nature and assisting with the restoration of several canvases. The following year he returned home, by way of France, and established his own studio, where he specialized in portraits.
His first commercial success came from a portrait of King Fernando VII, dressed in the uniform of the Order of the Golden Fleece, which he researched in Madrid so he could render the details accurately.
After 1834, he made several presentations at the "Real Academia de Ciencias y Artes de Barcelona", once again reflecting his eclectic interests; covering the history of art, natural sciences, the new daguerrotyping processes and Chevreul's work on the chemistry of dyes. Many of these were published as pamphlets. He became President of that institution in 1866. He married in 1854 at the age of fifty-two and, in his later years, concentrated entirely on portraits.