Ramón Silva (August 8, 1890 - June 17, 1919) was an Argentine painter of the Post-impressionist school.

Life and work

Ramón Silva was born in

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

in 1890. A self-taught painter, he learned the art beginning 1908 at the

atelier An atelier () is the private workshop or studio of a professional artist in the fine or decorative arts or an architect, where a principal master and a number of assistants, students, and apprentices can work together producing fine art or ...

managed by Martín Malharro, whose display at a 1902 Buenos Aires art exposition introduced normally conservative Argentine audiences to the Impressionist movement. The promising student was sponsored by one of the nation's foremost physicians at the time, Dr. Luis Agote, for a 1911 scholarship that took him to

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

, where he received influences from the Post-impressionist artists then current in Europe, particularly

Alfred Sisley Alfred Sisley (; ; 30 October 1839 – 29 January 1899) was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France, but retained British citizenship. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedicatio ...

. Returning to Buenos Aires in 1915, his watercolors received little acceptance and were judged to be more akin to the Postimpressionist approach of artists such as Fernando Fader and Cesáreo Bernaldo de Quirós (the Nexos group), then still pariahs among most local critics. Preferring solitude, Silva worked mostly in and around the arboretum at Parque Tres de Febrero, an extensive park in the Buenos Aires district of Palermo. Remaining in poverty, Ramón Silva contracted

pneumonia Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung primarily affecting the small air sacs known as alveoli. Symptoms typically include some combination of productive or dry cough, chest pain, fever, and difficulty breathing. The severi ...

, which cost him his life in 1919 at age 28.

References

''Museo de Arte Juan B. Castagnino: Ramón Silva''

External links

Post-impressionist painters Argentine painters Argentine male painters People from Buenos Aires 1890 births 1919 deaths {{Argentina-painter-stub