Camilo Egas (1889-September 18, 1962) was an Ecuadorian master painter and teacher, who was also active in the United States and Europe. Egas was married in Paris 1927 to dancer and artist Margarita Gibbons. Camilo Egas museum in Quito illustrates a self portrait of the artist of 1946 that is on the cover of a pamphlet published by them then used for a book Jan 2003 edition by del Banco central del Ecuador.
Early life and education
Camilo Alejandro Egas Silva was born in Quito, Ecuador, in 1889 and grew up in the San Blas neighborhood in the province of Pichincha to parents Camilo Egas Caldas, a professor, and Maria Zoila Silva Larrea, a homemaker. He began his primary education in 1895 at the Christian school named El Cebollar de Los Hermanos Cristianos. From an early age, he displayed a natural talent for the arts, spending his free time drawing in his father’s journals. He next studied at the San Gabriel y Mejia high schools before enrolling in fine arts. In 1905, he began his secondary education at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Quito, where he received multiple accolades for his paintings. In 1909, Egas received two gold medals for his talent in his artistic coursework. Both medals awarded in the competitions from the Nacional del Centenario de la Independencia and the Universitario del Cartel. Additionally, in 1911, Egas earned a government-issued grant to study abroad at the Royal Academy of Rome. During the same year, and before the start of World War I, Egas returned to the Escuela de Bellas Artes, where he subsequently won the Catedra de Pintura competition. Between 1918-1923, Egas won two more competitions, one from the Salon Mariano Aguilera and the other from the Mariano Aguilera de Quito contest. In 1919, Egas studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid on a second government grant. Egas also studied in the Académie Colarossi in Paris from 1920 to 1925, where he became the disciple and eventual friend of Pablo Picasso.
Indigenismo Movement in Ecuador
During the initial opening stages of the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Quito, in the early 1900s, the school began implementing a curriculum in correlation to the Ecuadorian’s efforts to create a modern national identity. The school’s mission was to emulate the European standard of art in order to portray the country’s newfound political and social agenda. This was evident in the way the school encouraged and pushed Neoclassicism in its programs of study. The school made efforts to send its students to study abroad in Europe and hired foreign artists to serve as teachers such as French Impressionist Paul Bar and Italian modernist sculptor Luigi Casadio. Between 1911-1915, Bar and Casadio started to separate themselves from the school’s European Neoclassical ideology. They instead focused on using and acknowledging the student’s surroundings and environment, going as far as implementing the usage of native individuals as live models. Hence, incorporating Ecuador’s cultural roots into the student’s artwork and in turn, modifying the traditional costumbrismo approach by making Indigenous Ecuadorian art more relevant.
After a three-year stay in Paris, Camilo Egas returned to Quito in 1915 following the intensification of World War I. It was during this time that Egas first experienced exposure to the revolutionary focus of Native American themes present in the Escuela de Bellas Artes. He studied and was influenced by Bar, Cassadio and the School director lithographer Víctor Puig, in choosing Indigenism as his artistic focus. Egas combined the Costumbrista painting tradition of Ecuador with the influences of contemporary art movements in other countries. He used his knowledge of European art techniques to create dramatic, large-scale oil paintings of Andean indigenous peoples and themes, bringing Indigenismo to the European ‘high art’ world. Egas’s ideology and aesthetic of the 1910s and 1920s connect him to Spanish modernism, a movement espoused by the School of Fine Arts at Quito, which was inspired by its modernity and nationalism. Egas applied the same Spanish standard of painting ethnic and exotic local subjects as a representation of Ecuadorian identity. In his decision to combine his globally acquired artisanship, Egas thus gained prestige by elevating the depiction of the native population in a refined aesthetic manner.