This is critic Juan Calzadilla’s biographical essay for the catalogue produced by the Museo Emilio Boggio (Caracas: Concejo Municipal del Distrito Federal, n.d.). Calzadilla provides a detailed report about Emilio Boggio, discussing where he was from, his education, influences, travels, milieu, and personal life, all of which help to place the Venezuelan artist and his life in time and place. The critic mentions the artist’s most important works, describing the circumstances in which they were produced and the role they played in his career as an artist.

In this essay, the critic, poet, and draftsman Juan Calzadilla (b. 1931) provides a complete and very detailed report on the life and work of Emilio Boggio (1857–1920). The essay includes a wealth of information, photographs of Boggio and his works, and biographical details about his life. Calzadilla’s goal is to present the painter in context, indicating his connections to contemporary artists such as Arturo Michelena, Cristóbal Rojas, Emilio Mauri, Antonio Herrera Toro, Henri Daguerre, and Henri Martin, among many others. What emerges is a profile of an Impressionist artist who was working in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, at a time when other avant-garde groups were developing in Europe. The essay also sheds light on how Boggio influenced young artists in Caracas when he came to Venezuela in 1919, something that is usually studied from the perspective of the young artists at the Escuela de Caracas who came in contact with the experienced, mature painter. In that context, however, there is very little reflection on Boggio’s life and work prior to his arrival in Venezuela, scant clues as to how he became the experienced painter who—together with Samys Mutzner and Nicolás Ferdinandov—pioneered a whole universe of possibilities at that time. Calzadilla’s essay helps to understand Boggio’s development as an artist and the circumstances in which he produced his work.