Francisco Sancha was born to a distinguished Malagan family. His father, a civil architect, enjoyed more than a passing interest in the artistic life of that city. He was well connected with the local scene; a good friend of Picasso’s father Don José Ruiz Blasco and the President of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1872. His careful drawings, mainly of fortresses and civic buildings, seem to have left an impression on the young Francisco Sancha, who despite being a cartoonist, became known for his architectural thoroughness in later life…
Sancha enrolled at the San Telmo School of Fine Arts just as the family fortunes were in decline. Sancha’s father came out of retirement in 1887 and worked away from home up until his death in 1890.
By 1897 Sancha was studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid under Jose Moreno Carbonero. But for the decline in his family fortunes, it is likely that Sancha would not have needed to produce caricatures. Instead he might have become an academic painter with a long, respectable list of polished canvases to his name.
Street Musicians, or Músicos callejeros, 1908 - Francisco Sancha (Collection Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid)
He instead began a lifelong affiliation to avant-garde publications, who sustained him in Madrid, Paris and London. In some senses, this need to produce illustrations resembles a Faustian bargain: a situation encountered by many artists, whose wishes for posterity are belied by the practical concerns of everyday life. In later years Sancha complained that it had handicapped him as a painter and that “an artist with nothing to do would suit me wonderfully.” Such a relationship also brought about his premature death in 1936, with his final months spent in a political prison for contributing cartoons to a leftist journal.
In 1897 Francisco Sancha contributed caricatures to the National Exhibition in Madrid. It was at the same time that he met a young Pablo Picasso, another native of Malaga. His caricatures are perhaps best described as pessimistic, though the figures are portrayed with too much sympathy to be grotesque, too dignified to be ridiculous.
Soon after the National Exhibition in 1899 Sancha left for Paris with the encouragement of Prime Minister Francisco Silvela and a scholarship of 1000 pesetas. Picasso joined him a year later, and he too would find that pesetas did not go far in the French capital. Sancha took work with journals such as Le cri de Paris, Le rire, Frou-Frou and L’Assiette au beurre. For the latter he provided numerous illustrations and it was likely through him that the magazine later approached a desperate Picasso with an offer of 800 francs in late 1900. In Paris the two seem to have become close friends. The sculptor Alberto Sanchez Perez recalls how in 1937 he informed Picasso of the death of Sancha, prompting him to reply: “Poor Paco, I owed him 100 francs.” It is also telling that in January 1969, when responding to a journalist on which artists he most admired, Picasso replied “Miguel Ángel [Michelangelo] y Paco Sancha.”
Sancha returned from Paris in 1905. He married Matile Padros the next year. Born to aristocratic Catalan family, she had become the first woman in Spain to receive a doctorate in 1893, at a time when less than 15% of Spanish females were literate. Two of her brothers were centrist politicians, best known for having founded Madrid Football Club (later Real Madrid) in 1902.
The couple divided their time between Madrid and Escorial. The country retreat of Lós Alamillos gave Sancha the tranquillity that became a feature of his later landscapes. His elegant lodgings overlooking the Retiro Park, gave him a plentiful supply of characters to observe and draw. He contributed them to the National Exhibition of 1908 and 1910.
The Ragpickers or Los Traperos, 1906 - Francisco Sancha (Illustration for Blanco y Negro)
The many journals to which he gave his drawings suggest that he was more concerned with living comfortably than political coherence. Gideon satirised the liberal centre to which he belonged, whilst Blanco y Negro provided an intellectual explication of its literary and artistic tastes. Sancha seems to have skirted the fringes of the Generation of 98, an intellectual current that advocated reform within Spain. Don Pio Baroja, whose curious brand of moderate anarchism drew the affections of a young Ernest Hemingway, wrote in 1947: “when I began to write, Sancha and his brother…. revealed themselves as cartoonists. [Francisco] Sancha drew street and suburban scenes very well. He had a tendency in drawing somewhat similar to mine in literature… representing the lives of the ragged and the miserable with great accuracy.”
English Period
Richmond Park, 1922 - Francisco Sancha (Watercolour and Bodycolour on Card)
(National Gallery, Bulgaria)
In 1911 Sancha and his family moved to London and took lodgings in Westminster. Their home would become a meeting place for Spanish emigres, including leftists such as Luis Araquistain and Ramiro de Maeztu and the conservativesJulio Camba and Julio Alvárez del Vayo. The pacifist Salvador de Madariaga joined them in 1916. He describes having “met a small but very good group of Spaniards, among whom Francisco Sancha stood out. "
It was around this time that Sancha worked for the British government. He visited the Western front, where he seems to have served as an unofficial war artist. Though not overtly political, these illustrations instead fix upon the futility of war and the devastation filtering back across the channel. Finding that he could no longer afford his studio on Margravine or the family home, he moved to a smaller house in Kensington. His wife, Matilde, began offering private Spanish lessons, and took employment with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Sancha branched out into the applied arts, satisfying commissions in carpentry and furniture decoration. He also helped with the restoration of the Spanish Centre on Cavendish Square, producing a mural for each of the historic regions of Spain.
Around 1918, likely through Salvador de Madariaga, he met the art dealer Molly Bernhard Smith, who gave him a solo exhibition at her XXI Gallery in 1918. The same gallery would later host a young Jacop Epstein and was the headquarters of the influential Senefelder Group, putting Sancha in contact with artists such as Augustus John, Henri Matisse and William Rothenstein.
England seems to have left a lasting impression on Sancha, giving him a taste of recognition and introducing him to the literary and artistic circles that stimulated him during his fertile years. The First World War reaffirmed his anglophile tendencies, whilst obliterating the tolerance and optimism that once allowed a diverse circle of Spanish emigres to meet and disagree on friendly terms. Ideological differences that were tolerable precisely because they were academic, were now real and irreconcilable. The group fell apart, settling into the very same divisions that lead Spain to a Civil War in 1936.
It is telling that during his time in London, Sancha generally painted in watercolour, dividing his subjects “between England and Spain, between the Thames Valley and the Sussex Downs… Madrid and Toledo…”. The critic Charles Mariott (1869-1957), writing in 1920, just a few years after the publication of his seminal Masterpieces in Modern Art, felt that “In architectural landscape no living painter takes a higher place than Francisco Sancha.”
Tall with pale eyes, Sancha once joked that he resembled “an English Lord who had gone wrong.” He enjoyed visiting London parks, producing watercolours of Hyde Park, Kew and Kensington Gardens. Such paintings anticipate the distinctly English landscapes of Eric Ravillious, John Nash and Graham Sutherland by more than a decade.
Though Sancha and Newton lived and worked in London at the same time, there is no obvious link between them, aside from that the critic Charles Marriott seems to have championed both painters. It is possible that Marriott might have known Newton from his time in Western Cornwall, when both men were living in the artist’s colony at Lamorna.
Later Years
Francisco Sancha returned to Madrid in 1922, with a cheerful and optimistic tolerance likely misplaced in a city where political opponents were beginning to murder one another. He resumed his contact with old friends and journals and even included himself in a large group portrait of 1925, portraying a long a diverse list of modernist artists and writers, including the symbolist painter Julio Romero de Torres, the writer and diplomat Pérez Ayala (painted by Joaquin Sorolla in 1920) and the dramatist Ramón del Valle-Inclán. All of them supposedly gathered to toast the sculptor Sebastián Miranda.
It was during the same period that he began painting the landscapes, which could not have been further from the sociable bustle of his caricatures. Though they capture the hard cinematic light of central Spain, they evoke the dreamlike serenity of Algernon Newton or the deserted streets of Edward Hopper. That all three artists came to a similar style independent of one another, might speak for a general feeling common to the period following WWI and the Spanish Flu. The cities themselves remained the same, but the humans that inhabited them had changed a great deal. Not simply were there fewer of them, but there was also a general distrust of human contact, a wish to retreat from public life into introspection and isolation. For Sancha, who died in a political prison just 14 years later, such instincts were well-founded.
Sancha arrived in Oviedo in June 1936, after being invited by the editor of the leftist Avance. Whether Sancha understood the political landscape of the city, or the capacity of his new employers to rouse local passions, is unclear. Ostensibly, with its plentiful supply of industrial workers, Oviedo would have seemed like a safe city for a left-leaning caricaturist at this time.
Though trusted by the locals, the allegiances of the military governor changed abruptly following the departure of 4000 well-armed coal miners to the Castilian front in July 1936. Safely out of the way, he declared for the nationalists and with the help of the civil guard sought about consolidating his power. Sancha seems to have been caught in the ensuing crackdown. His newspaper was shut down and its workforce thrown into prison. On 26th of September, just two months later, Sancha died of complications from a stomach ulcer. His wife would die a few months later, reportedly of grief.