Francisco Iturrino

Francisco Nicolas Iturrino Gonzalez was born on 9 September 1864 in Santander, Spain. His family moved from Santander to Bilbao while he was a child, where he studied drawing at a private academy and learned informally from his uncle, the musician, poet, and painter Elviro Gonzalez. He completed his secondary schooling at the Colegio de los Agustinos de Bilbao, earning his bachillerato in 1882.

He then traveled to Liege, Belgium, around 1883 to study engineering, but abandoned the program within a year or two to pursue art. He then studied painting in Brussels, associated with the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts, before moving to Paris in 1895, where he entered the studio of Gustave Moreau as a pupil alongside a young Henri Matisse. In 1901 Ambroise Vollard showed his work in Paris in the same period Vollard was also exhibiting Picasso, and Vollard went on to organize four solo exhibitions of Iturrino's paintings through 1911. In 1920 the critic Elie Faure organized a further exhibition of his work at the Galerie Rosenberg in Paris. Some later biographical accounts credit Iturrino with a gold medal at Madrid's Exposicion Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1901, but this claim is not corroborated by the principal encyclopedic and museum sources consulted for this profile and should be treated with caution.

Iturrino's mature work, built from Andalusian and Moorish genre subjects, flamenco dancers, nudes, and Mediterranean landscapes, is known for a chromatic intensity that places him close to Fauvism. He later withdrew to Cagnes-sur-Mer in the south of France, where he died. The most widely corroborated date, given by multiple encyclopedic sources and a specialist museum entry, is 20 June 1924, though a minority of Spanish institutional sources give 21 June 1924.

Iturrino's reputation rests substantially on his early Paris circle. His inclusion in Ambroise Vollard's gallery alongside Picasso in 1901, and Elie Faure's decision to mount a dedicated exhibition of his work at the Galerie Rosenberg in 1920, mark him as a recognized figure among the critics and dealers who shaped early twentieth-century Parisian modernism. More recently, the Museo Carmen Thyssen Malaga's 2018 to 2019 retrospective, La furia del color, reintroduced his work to a broader public and reaffirmed the museum's own framing of him as one of the principal artists in its permanent collection.

Iturrino's auction market is sparse and unevenly documented, and independent research could not corroborate a confirmed realized price for any single work. A gallery listing describes a sale of Dama en un paisaje, an oil on canvas, at Fernando Duran in Madrid on 27 December 2023 for EUR 11,000, though this reported price could not be independently verified. A pencil study, Boceto de mujeres, sold for a modest EUR 400 at Subastas Segre. Separately, a Setdart listing carried an estimate of EUR 45,000 to 50,000, and a work titled Manolas has been associated with a figure of EUR 32,500 at Duran Subastas, but in both cases public reporting does not confirm whether the work sold or at what final price. Given these gaps, no single sale can be reliably named as his all-time auction record, and collectors should treat any such claim with skepticism until a hammer price is directly confirmed.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Iturrino and no gallery or estate currently manages authentication on his behalf, so provenance and documented exhibition history carry unusual weight when evaluating a work. His market is thin: confirmed auction results are few, several widely cited price figures are unconfirmed estimates rather than realized sales, and reputable sources even disagree on the exact date of his death. His standing rests far more securely on museum holdings in Spain and France, and on his documented place in the circle around Vollard, Matisse, and Moreau, than on any deep or continuous auction record. Collectors should treat headline price figures for this artist with particular caution until they can be traced to a specific, confirmed hammer price.