Juan Francisco González Escobar is known as one of the four Great Chilean Masters and as the archetypal romantic bohemian artist of the early 20th century. He was the most prolific of the Chilean masters, leaving an estimated 4,000 works, and was also notable for being one of Chile's first modern painters. He was seen as a symbol of the new creative generation that appeared in 20th centuryChile, with a style highly influenced by impressionism and local elements. Right from the beginning, González worked in a free and flexible manner and did not stick rigidly to any particular techniques, giving him space to express his lively and restless personality. He took his attitude towards art as an attitude towards life and was considered by his successors as great example to follow. As a master, González used to tell his students that to be a good painter, “first you must learn to observe and get excited about the colours and forms of nature, regardless of whether the picture and its details are accurate reflection of reality or not.”
Biography
Juan Francisco González, son of José González and Mercedes Escobar, grew up in Recoleta, a neighborhood of Santiago that runs along the side of Cerro Blanco hill, where his family ran a business importing goods from Ecuador. As a child, his parents enrolled him in art classes with Chilean artist Manuel Tapia and when he was 14, by a strange twist of fate, he met Pedro Lira, who would become another of the four Chilean masters. Lira, seeing that the boy had a bright future, recommended that he continue his career at the Chilean Academy of Painting. In 1869, aged 16, he entered the Academy, and was taught by the painters Ernesto Kirchbach and Juan Mochi. ”, who tried to live by balancing aesthetics and ethics, creative spirit and art, a philosophy which González maintained even after the group dissolved. González died on March 4, 1933, and is considered to have changed the course of Chilean painting. Isabel Cruz González called him “the first modern Chilean painter” and said that “he left a mark like none other of his contemporaries, capturing on canvas the essence of Chilean popular life.” Throughout his career, until the day he died, he aimed for the maximum effect on the canvas, minimising and simplifying the themes, a characteristic that can be observed from his early landscapes to the still lifes he produced at the end of his life.
1997 named most influential painter in Chile in a top ten ranking produced by a survey of a hundred thought leaders by the Cultural Corporation of Las Condes, Santiago, Chile
