Ricardo Baroja

In 1890 he travelled to the art circles of Málaga and València and was inspired by the older painters Francisco Domingo Marqués and Ignacio Pinazo Camarlench.

[4] When his aunt died the brothers sold the bakery and Ricardo became a kind of Bohemian archivist working at the Archivo de Cáceres and, for short periods, at the library in Bilbao.

He had always wanted to work in museums and had only achieved the bureaucratic tedium of filing and cataloging which went against his restless nature, and so he went on to pursue the bohemian life of the artist.

Ricardo belonged to the Generation of '98, a group of writers, philosophers, musicians and artists disillusioned with the reality that Spain was slowly losing its empire as well as its moral, political and spiritual compass.

In those early days, art and literature did not provide enough to live on so upon hearing accounts of buried treasure, Ricardo set out armed and on horseback with his close friend Ramón del Valle-Inclán for the ancient mercury mines of Almadén in La Mancha in search of an undiscovered trove.

On 31 May 1906, Mateu Morral, a Catalan anarchist, threw a bomb from a balcony on the Calle Mayor at the ceremonial coach of Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg during their nuptial festivities.

Failing in his attempted assassination, and with the Guardia Civil close on his heels, Morral committed suicide in Torrejón de Ardoz.

Morral's body was identified not by political cronies but by Valle-Inclán and Ricardo Baroja, who had met the regicidal Catalan during the tertulias at the Horchateria de Candelas in Madrid.

On 8 February 1926, they inaugurated their amateur theatre group El Mirlo Blanco (The White Blackbird) at their home in Madrid, with the support of many intellectuals and notable playwrights such as Valle-Inclán, Edgar Neville, Cipriano Rivas Cherif and Claudio de la Torre (1895–1973).

In 1928, Ricardo was appointed professor at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Gráficas and returned to engraving, which he had abandoned since the death of his father in 1912.

[14] In 1931, returning from a rally in support of the Second Spanish Republic, he lost his right eye in an automobile accident in Navalcarnero, near Madrid, which forced him to abandon painting and engraving and devote himself to writing.

[15] The sudden uprising of the Spanish Civil War saw the home of Carmen and Ricardo destroyed in a bombing raid along with all his literary work.

Verbal grace, frank humor, pleasant laughter, paradoxical flights are also distinctive in Ricardo Baroja - beloved of the Muses - who, eschewing romantic sputterings, heads toward old age.

In 1995 the town council of his birthplace, Minas de Río Tinto, renamed a street to Avenida Ricardo Baroja.