Women Collecting Water, Casto Plasencia y Maestro (Cañizar, July 17, 1846-Madrid, May 18, 1890)

Women Collecting Water, Casto Plasencia y Maestro (Cañizar, July 17, 1846-Madrid, May 18, 1890)
Oil on canvas, signed. Canvas measures: 96 x 72, framed measures: 129 x 105 cm. He studied at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid and was on pension in Rome to study history painting. There he would paint the painting Origin of the Roman Republic (year 598, before the Christian era), with which he obtained a first medal at the National Exhibition of 1878 and third medal and great cross of the Legion of Honor at the Universal in Paris in that same year. Upon his return to Spain he settled in Madrid. Portrait painter of the kings Alfonso XII and María de las Mercedes, he stood out in religious painting and in the great decorative work, such as the one carried out in the Madrid basilica of San Francisco el Grande, in which, apart from his work as a painter in the main dome of the temple, will become inspector of works, appointed by Carlos Luis de Ribera, at the time artistic director of the same. Without a doubt, this will be one of the most important projects of the moment, in which the most outstanding brushes of the country were counted on. During that time, other public and private buildings in Madrid were embellished, among which the decoration of the palace of the Marquis of Linares stands out, in which Casto Plasencia also participated. In the summer of 1884 he was invited by Tomás García Sampedro to visit the Asturian town of Muros del Nalón and was so seduced by the landscape that he founded a colony of artists dedicated to painting from nature during the summer periods. From this period are a series of small notes with loose brushstrokes, made between 1884 and 1889, very different from the great history paintings,