José Cabrero y Mons en la tertulia del Café de Pombo

Abstract

This doctoral thesis on José Cabrero y Mons, the unidentified artist who features in La tertuliadel Café de Pombo (A Meeting of Friends at the Café de Pombo), had its origins in curiosity as towho the unidentified artist in this commemorative group portrait is and why so little is knownabout him.The question as to who the particular artist in this group portrait is has interested researcherssuch as Javier Barón Thaidigismann, Head of Conservation in 19th Century painting at theNational Museum; Juan Manuel Bonet, art critic and writer, and Enrique la Fuente-Ferrari, ahistorian and Fine Arts academic, but, to date, no monographic study on the person in questionhas been written.The introduction to the doctoral thesis tells us of José Cabrero y Mons’ life in Paris as the 19thCentury turned into the 20th. He was acquainted with artists from the Impressionist Movementand knew such luminaries of pre-modern and modern art as Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec,Cézanne and Picasso. On Cabrero’s return from Paris in the 1920s, Ramón Gómez de la Sernainvited him to his literary get-togethers at the Café de Pombo and, of all the gathering, Cabrerowas the only one of whom José Gutiérrez Solana did an individual portrait. From studies ofFrancisco Iturrino, his close friend, and others on Agustín Riancho and Pablo Picasso, we areled to understand that many contemporary painters appreciated him and held him in highesteem.The researchers mentioned above were unaware of his pictorial oeuvre and of the fact that hemade a collection of his friends’ productions – a collection put together from a painter’s, ratherthan an art collector’s, perspective. Overlooked also, was the library he assembled of a judiciousselection of historic and literary volumes amongst which were books dedicated to him byhis friends...