Tomás Povedano

Tomás Povedano de Arcos (Lucena, Spain, September 22, 1847 — San José, Costa Rica 1943) was a Spanish painter, who spent much of his life in Costa Rica.

Biography He studied painting in Málaga and Seville, a city where he worked as an illustrator while he was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts and taught private drawing lessons. His artistic career began by decorating fans, which will be revealed later in a series of flower paintings and allegorical themes.

He collaborated with the movement that tried to establish the First Spanish Republic by writing in some media such as El Abanderado and El Baluarte; He was a volunteer militiaman and representative delegate of the Provincial Committee before the Municipal Committee of Republican Coalition. He was a Mason (he was even Venerable Master of the Respectful Lodge Hermes N. 7) and a theosophist.

Fine arts school director

Povedano implemented academicism in the School he founded and was a consistent opponent of the new pictorial trends of the late nineteenth century and the avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Thus, he wrote that the works of synthesism, cubism, futurism and orphism were "studies of contemporary artistic pathology, [...] engenders of dementia, that it is not conceived how they could have been accepted for a moment without severe rejection in peoples who presume to go to the head of civilization ».

As an essay dedicated to the plastic arts exhibitions held in San José from 1928 to 1937 points out, the School of Fine Arts was an "academy entirely with its back to the renovating tendencies of the time. His works are aimed primarily at certain areas of social elite refinement".

Numismatics Several works by Povedano served as the basis for images that were later recorded on banknotes that circulated in Costa Rica. The first in which a portrait made by the Spanish artist was used is that of 10 colones from 1903, issued by the Anglo Costa Rican Bank. This is a charcoal drawing by Braulio Carrillo Colina, which had been published the previous year in the Magazine of Costa Rica. This portrait is the most reproduced in Costa Rican paper money: thus, it was re-engraved on the 5 colón banknotes of the National Bank of Costa Rica in the 1940s, and in others of the Central Bank in the 1950s and 1960s.

The portrait of José Rafael Gallegos, who ruled the country twice, was chosen to adorn the 1-colon bill of the Costa Rican Anglo in 1917, but it never went into circulation.

The influence of Povedano's drawings is clearly present in the image that illustrates the reverse of the 10-bank National Banknote of the F series of 1939: the engraving of the aboriginal chief is very similar to the cacique huetar that the painter made for the historical Primer of Costa Rica.

In 1938, Povedano made a pencil drawing of Juan de Cavallón (currently in the Visual Arts Collection of the Central Bank), which three years later would be reproduced by the engraver of the printing house Waterlow and Sons, London, on the ticket 20 colones of the National Bank, series E, in 1941.

In the same year and in the same bank, the 2-colon banknote, series E, was circulated, which had on its back the modified image of The Rescue of Dulcehé, an unfinished oil painting by Povedano. The engraver of the printing house made the pertinent changes to present a finished work: he drew the characters of the figures insinuated in the original work, modified some positions of others and added background elements, as explained by Manuel Chacón, curator of numismatics in the Museums of the Central Bank.

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