My Uncle and My Two Cousins

Zuloaga painted this over 1898 and 1899, the years in which Spain lost Cuba and the Philippines in its war with the United States. The defeat sent many Spanish writers back to old Castile, its bare plains and its customs, in search of what the country really was. The sitters are his own family. The bearded man in the dark cape is his uncle Daniel Zuloaga, a ceramicist known for tiles of rural Castilian life, and the two young women in black lace mantillas are Daniel's daughters. One holds a fan in a grey-gloved hand, the other stands with a hand on her hip, and both wear yellow flowers. A brindled greyhound sits at the uncle's side. The French State bought the picture at the Paris Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1899.