The founder of a dynasty of artists not known for their innovative curiosity, Ignacio Pinazo nevertheless overcame the academicist constraints of his institutional education and painted following his instincts. In his youth he made the obligatory concession to history painting and dabbled in anecdotal Italianate themes, but he soon set aside conventional trivia and focused on developing a direct, succinct and free style of pure realism. If pressed to identify Pinazo with one of the European artistic movements of his day, we might say that his work is a sister—but not the daughter—of French Impressionism. However, given the isolation in which he spent most of his life, it is unlikely that he was influenced by any of the Impressionists. Pinazo's style is therefore an original, homegrown creation independent from the living art of his time.

Two of his favourite motifs, the female nude and children, are combined in Nymphs and Cupids, whose perspective and composition suggest that it is a modello for a decorative ceiling panel. While the typology is overly conventional, the execution is highly original and uniquely "Pinazian", with occasionally blurred patches of colour outlined by unembellished, finely drawn brushstrokes that perfectly define the forms of the figures.

Perhaps because it gave him a pretext for depicting two splendid female nudes, Pinazo always had a special fondness for The Daughters of El Cid, sent to the Provincial Council of Valencia as proof of the good use he was making of his grant to study in Rome. He redid the work ten years later, at the height of his pictorial maturity, so that he could have it with him always. This second version, now in the Banco Santander Collection, is larger than the first (which measured 187 x 124 cm) and we can see that his technique changed dramatically in the interim. Here the emphasis is on detail work; the figures are enveloped in carefully modelled plasticity; the study of the hands and arms is more synthetic; and on the feet the outline of the toes is barely visible.

The excellent portrait of an unknown man in the collection is also a mature work, where realism is expressed with extraordinarily vigorous, fresh, confident brushwork. Though undated, we can assume that it was painted around the same time as his Self-Portrait with a hat (1901, Museo del Prado), when the artist had eradicated all traces of conventionalism and pictorial prudence from his portraits—long since ousted from other genres—to make way for an open, agile yet profound expressivity. [Francesc Fontbona]