José Jiménez Aranda

The brother of Luis Jiménez Aranda, also a painter, José was one of the most talent artists of the Andalusian painting scene of the 19th century. In 1851 he enrolled at the Seville School of Fine Arts, where he was taught, among others, by Antonio Cabral Bejarano, Manuel Barrón and Eduardo Cano, who regarded him as a favourite student and left a mark on his initial work. In 1864 José Jiménez Aranda took part for the first time in a National Exhibition, achieving an honorary mention for a genre scene entitled La huérfana (The Orphan”). Four years later he moved to Jerez de la Frontera and married María Dolores Vázquez. In 1870 he again took part in the National Exhibition entering genre scenes, notable among which is A Pass in the Bullring, which was awarded a third medal. The following year he befriended Mariano Fortuny and Raimundo de Madrazo in Seville and decided to follow them to Rome, also taking with him his family and his young pupil José García Ramos. In the Italian capital he produced his first works in the précieux style, such as Los penitentes en la basílica de Asís (“Penitents in the Basilica of Assisi”, 1874). In 1893 Jiménez Aranda established himself again in Seville, where he taught at the Academia Libre until 1897 and from then onwards at the School of Fine Arts, taking the place of his master Eduardo Cano. From the middle of the 1890s he frequented the town of Alcalá de Guadaíra, where he joined the group of Sevillian landscape artists headed by Emilio Sánchez-Perrier. One of his last successes was at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, where he showed 137 bozzetti on the subject of Don Quixote and was awarded a gold medal. He died at his Sevillian home on 6 May 1903.