Artist

Juan Conchillos

(Valencia, 1641-1711)

Juan Conchillos was born in Valencia in 1641. He first trained with the painter Esteban March from whom he assimilated a typically dynamic Baroque style at the time when the Valencian school still tended to favour the tenebrist naturalism that had prevailed since the early 17th century. In 1668, he travelled to Madrid where regularly visited the academies and copied paintings by the great masters and also some of the sculptures that had been brought back from Italy by Velázquez and which were housed in the Alcázar. Following his return to Valencia, his work reflects his knowledge of the new, courtly art that he had seen in Madrid. Sadly, little of Conchillos’ painted oeuvre has survived as most of it was destroyed in the Spanish Civil War. Nonetheless, his presence is still to be felt in Valencia and Murcia where he undertook most of his artistic activity. Given the loss of most of his paintings, Conchillos’ art can now best be studied through the large number of surviving drawings by his hand. These have been catalogued by specialists and divided into three distinct thematic groups: academic studies, preliminary studies for compositions, and landscapes.