Eduardo Zamacois (Bilbao, 1841-Madrid, 1871)

The set of art and documents by the painter Eduardo Zamacois is primarily comprised of collections that have been conserved in Paris by his descendants. It includes important correspondence with other prominent painters of the period, like a letter from his master Ernest Meissonier and another from Mariano Fortuny. There are also several illustrated letters that Zamacois sent to his artist friends Jehan Georges Vibert, Édouard Detaille and Jules Worms and the collector William H. Stewart, as well as sketches and drawings by Zamacois and Detaille. The collection also offers an array of documentary pieces, like photographs showing the painter’s works or models posing from the 1860s. It also includes publications on the artist and catalogues from auctions that contain interesting details about how his works were commercialised. All of these materials provide new information on Zamacois’s career and his relevance in Paris’s artistic circles in the mid-nineteenth century.

These donations are joined by the paintings that recently joined the collection via donations or purchases. They include Country Watchman (1867), an important example of genre painting, to which Zamacois added a comical take that was highly prized by the public and collectors. Set in the French countryside in the eighteenth century, the scene shows how a watchman surprises a young man, who tries to prove his innocence by emptying his pockets as he hides stolen apples under his cap. The painting was acquired by the author Charles Dickens in New York in 1868

Guiard Family Collections

Born in 1833 in the Pyrenean town of Saint-Béat, Alphonse Guiard was among the many French photographers who moved to Spain in the mid-nineteenth century with the intention of living off of photography, a business that was in its infancy here at that time. In around 1857, he moved to Bilbao, where he married Juliana Larrauri. His descendants’ donation of several albumen silver prints and around 140 photographic plates reveals that he was a photographer of views, portraits and church interiors, which enriched the city’s nineteenth-century iconography—Santiago cathedral and San Nicolás church, Plaza Nueva, the city theatre, the Los Fueros and El Arenal bridges, Abando Station—while also furthering our knowledge of the history of Basque photography.

His son, the painter Adolfo Guiard (Bilbao, 1860–1916), was crucial in updating painting in Bizkaia through impressionism, Japonisme and symbolism, trends he learned about during his time in Paris (1880–c.1885). The donation of an extensive collection of drawings and documents related to the artist—correspondence, photographs, invoices—is joined by the recent acquisitions of several paintings, most notably Horse Race (c.1885–1886), which reflects the influence of Degas, whom Guiard had met in Paris in the 1880s. The use of line and colour, the unfinished facture, the off-centre composition and the choice of the equestrian theme prove the formal correspondences with the French painter.

Felipe Manterola (Zeanuri, Bizkaia, 1885-1977)

A self-taught photographer, although he never actually considered himself a professional, Manterola’s work went beyond mere amateurism. Throughout his lifetime, he combined his passion for photography with his management of a shop, inn and newsstand in Zeanuri, his hometown. He also sold his photos in this family shop, which were published as postcards in Germany, France and Bilbao. These images, whose ethnographic value has become clear over time, were reproduced in the essay Los vascos (1949) by Julio Caro Baroja. They document the sociological changes and technological advances that were driving the transition from a traditional rural society to a modern, heavily industrialised one.

Manterola’s descendants have donated the entire collection—more than 1,000 glass plates, 160 postcards and 323 photographs from between 1904 and 1936—as well as the document archive and different photography-related equipment.

Patricio Echeverría Archive

The photographer Gorka Salmerón (Legazpi, Gipuzkoa, 1969) donated a major collection that graphically documents the history of Patricio Echeverría S.A. in Legazpi between 1918 and 1960. It is comprised of 209 black-and-white silver gelatine photographs in a variety of formats. Different professionals were commissioned to make these materials—including Photito, Koch and Pando—with the goal of showcasing the factory’s activities in trade fairs and illustrating its product catalogues.

Likewise, for several decades Salmerón photographed the landscape of his hometown and county, showing a particular sensibility towards architecture and the labour in workshops. The outcome is a document record of extraordinary technical quality which he used in a book of seventy images published in 1995.

Saul Steinberg (1914-1999)

Steinberg was born in Romania to a Jewish family with Russian roots. He studied Philosophy and Humanities in Bucharest and lived in Milan between 1933 and 1941, where he earned a degree as an architect and developed his vocation for drawing. Fleeing from the Italian government’s antisemitic laws, he moved to the United States in 1942, in part with the help of the magazine The New Yorker, where his drawings for interior pages and covers became world famous.

The donation was offered by The Saul Steinberg Foundation of New York, a nonprofit organization created by the artist in his will, which deemed that the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum was the appropriate place to house the prestigious artist’s works. Thus, in 2023, the museum received the donation of an important set of drawings and prints; five of these drawings are now being displayed from the series on bullfighting inspired by Goya after a trip around Spain in 1957.

María Franciska Dapena (Barruelo de Santullán, Palencia, 1924-Bilbao, 1995)

An artist with a strong political commitment—she was imprisoned between 1962 and 1964 for collaborating with the Communist Party of Spain—María Franciska Dapena’s career unfolded in the Basque Country from the 1940s to 1970s. In around 1955, she met the painters Agustín Ibarrola and Ismael Fidalgo, with whom she began to hold travelling exhibitions around Bizkaia with the goal of bringing art to the non-expert public. Even though Ibarrola’s move to Paris halted the project, she once again collaborated with him in 1962, when they and Dionisio Blanco founded the group Estampa Popular de Bizkaia, which promoted the creation of graphic works as part of committed political action against the dictatorship.

The donation includes graphic works dated between 1963—including several works she made while in prison—and the early 1980s, along with all the linoleum and wooden plates conserved. It also includes an invaluable trove of documents of extraordinary interest to Basque art and knowledge about Dapena’s career. This archive includes texts by Dapena that are being publicised for the first time thanks to a book being published by the museum, edited by David Fuente.