Tomás Povedano

He studied painting in Málaga and Seville, a city where he worked as an illustrator while he was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts and taught private drawing lessons.

President Rafael Yglesias Castro hires him to organize the National School of Fine Arts, which is inaugurated on March 12 of the following year in San José.

Impressed by the aborigines, Povedano painted pictures that reflect, idealized, the culture, history, art and physiognomy of the native population of America.

In 1926 he was selected - along with Enrique Echandi, Ezequiel Jiménez and Emil Span - to represent Costa Rica in the 1925 Pan American Painting Exhibition, sponsored by the Los Angeles Museum of Art and held on its premises.

He introduced watercolor in Costa Rica and showed interest in the flora of the country, painting, like Span, pictures of orchids and other native plants.

He was the organizer of the Costa Rican theosophical movement and founder of the Virya Lodge (between 1905 and 1915 he directed the magazine of the same name), from which he derived the Dharana, which Roberto Brenes presided.

Thus, he wrote that the works of synthesism, cubism, futurism and orphism were "studies of contemporary artistic pathology, [...] engenders of dementia, that it is not conceived how they could have been accepted for a moment without severe rejection in peoples who presume to go to the head of civilization ».

As for natural models, in addition to the portrait, still lifes prevailed: flowers, vegetables and fruits; Another frequent theme was the landscapes of lakes with roundabouts or swans, many of which "were archaic."

[2] The influence of Povedano's drawings is clearly present in the image that illustrates the reverse of the 10-bank National Banknote of the F series of 1939: the engraving of the aboriginal chief is very similar to the cacique huetar that the painter made for the historical Primer of Costa Rica.