Mariano Fortuny Y Marsal Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Mariano Fortuny Marsal aka Marià Fortuny y Marsal father died when Mariano Fortuny Marsal was an infant, and his mother by the time he was 12. Thus, Mariano Fortuny Marsal was raised by his grandfather, a cabinet-maker who taught him to make wax dolls. At 9 years old, at a public competition in his town, a local painter, teacher, and patron, Domènec Soberano, encouraged him to study further. At the age of 14 with his grandfather, he moved to Barcelona. The sculptor Domènec Talarn secured him an annuity enabling him to go to the Academy of Barcelona and for four years he studied under Claudi Lorenzale and Pau Milà y Fontanals. In 1857 Maria Fortuny Marsal won a scholarship that qualified him for a further two years of studies in Rome the following year.

In 1859, he was called by the Government of the Province of Barcelona to depict the campaigns of the Spanish-Moroccan War. That year he went to Morocco for three months, making sketches of landscapes and battles, which he showed in Madrid and Barcelona when he returned. These would later serve him as preparatory sketches for his monumental piece, The Battle of Tetuan.

Since the days of Diego Velázquez, there had been a tradition throughout Europe of memorializing battles and victories in oil paintings. Based on his experiences, Mariano Fortuny Marsal was commissioned by the Council of the Province of Barcelona to paint a large canvas diorama of the capture of the enemy camps of Muley-el-Abbas and Muley-el-Hamed by the Spanish army. He began his composition of The Battle of Tetuan on a canvas 45 feet long and though he worked on it, on and off for ten years, he never completed it.

Those two months spent in Morocco was his later fascination with the exotic themes of Moroccan architecture and its people. He visited Paris in 1868 and shortly afterward married Cecilia de Madrazo the daughter of painter Federico De Madrazo Y Kuntz. Another visit to Paris in 1870 was followed by a two years stay at Granada Spain, then he returned to Rome, where he died suddenly from malaria.

Maria Fortuny y Marsal paintings are colorful, with a vivacious luminous brush stroke that at times recalls the delicate quality of Rococo painting but also anticipates Impressionist brushwork.

Art Movement: Romanticism, Orientalism.
Artists Influencing Fortuny y Marsal: Claudi Lorenzale, Pau Milà y Fontanals.
He Traveled To France, Morocco, Italy.
Painters Maria Fortuny y Marsal Influenced: Attilio Simonetti.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.