View of the Wharf at Cartagena

Ca. 1793. Oil on canvas. On display elsewhere

Trained from childhood at the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Mariano Sánchez specialized in landscapes and views. Contemporary documents reveal also a talent for miniatures and portraits, which took him to Lisbon in the service of the King of Portugal. In 1781, King Charles III commissioned him to paint a series of 118 vistas of ports, bays, islands, and arsenals in Spain. In 1803, for reasons of health, he had to abandon the project. It was continued by other artists. The genre of the “veduta” originates in Italy, particularly in Venice, attaining its greatest splendor in the 18^th century. Views of cities and their inhabited surroundings, of ports and other curiosities gave expression to the trend toward analysis and classification during this period in European culture. Detailed descriptions were part of the same interest in systematized knowledge that drove the encyclopedists, and were encouraged by the ideas of the Enlightenment. In Spain, the enlightened monarch Charles III wished to create a testament to important locations, as commissioned from artists like Sánchez, Luis Paret y Alcázar and Antonio Carnicero. Sánchez began his work in Andalucía, where he stayed from 1781 to 1785. It is to these years that View of the Port of Santa María (P1151) must be assigned. He moved to the Mediterranean coast. In October, 1787, he traveled to Barcelona to paint vistas of the Catalonian seacoast; one of these is the View of the Bridge at Martorell (P002922). He painted View of the Wharf at Cartagena too. In 1792 he went to Galicia, and soon to the north of Spain, where he stayed until 1795 to paint views of the Cantabrian coast. In 1796, he received the title of Painter to the Court. Sánchez´s representational landscape painting derive their special charm from a certain naïveté in the clear and spacious compositions and the gentle palette of pastel tones, light pinks, grays, blues and greens, that were so much to the taste of the period. The painter animated these scenes with small passages from everyday life, related to the contemporary scenes on the tapestries decorating the walls of the Palace of Madrid and other royal residences (Text drawn from Mena, Manuela; The Majesty of Spain, Jackson, Mississippi, 2001, pp. 79-80).