Jimeno y Planes, Rafael (c. 1760–1825)

Rafael Jimeno y Planes (also Ximeno; b. ca. 1760; d. 1825), painter. Born into a family of artists, Jimeno was trained at the Academia de San Carlos in Valencia and also spent time in Madrid and in Rome absorbing the neoclassical style. In 1794 he arrived in New Spain to teach painting at the Academia de San Carlos; four years later he became its general director and continued to teach there for the rest of his life. His portraits of fellow academicians Jerónimo Gil and Manuel Tolsá are considered his best work, but just as significant were his paintings in the dome of the cathedral of Mexico City (1809–1810) and in the Capilla del Señor in the Church of Santa Teresa (1813), both lost. Important paintings in the chapel of Tolsá's Palacio de Minería (1812–1813) survive. Jimeno also did drawings for engravings, notably for illustrations of Don Quixote in Spain and of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City after the installation of Tolsá's equestrian statue of Charles IV.

See alsoArt: The Nineteenth Century .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Xavier Moyssén Echeverría, El pintor Rafael Ximeno y Planes, su libreta de dibujos (1985).

Manuel Toussaint, Colonial Art in Mexico (1967).

Additional Bibliography

Pierce, Donna, Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, and Clara Bargellini. Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521–1821. Denver: Frederick and Jan Mayer Center for Pre-Colombian and Spanish Colonial Art, Denver Art Museum, 2004.

                                     Clara Bargellini