The Cabildo of Gran Canaria will return to the family of the Republican mayor Pedro Rico five pictorial works confiscated in 1938 by the Franco government and kept for more than seven decades in the funds of the Casa de Colón in the capital of the island, as announced by This newspaper at the end of last year.
This was announced on Thursday by the company in a press release in which it specified that the resolution to return these pictorial works had already been notified to the representative of the heir family, and that it was taking shape “after a complicated but exemplary administrative process that began quickly at the end of last year 2023.”
The Cabildo emphasizes that with this gesture, it becomes the first public institution in the country to promote a return file of this nature in accordance with the conditions provided for in the Democratic Memory Law of 2022.
Pedro Rico Pérez (Madrid, 1888-Aix en Provence, France, 1957) was mayor of Madrid in 1936 and the works that will now be returned to his family belonged to his private collection and are signed by well-known artists of the time: Eugenio Lucas Velázquez, Roberto Domingo Fallola and Francisco Domingo Marqués.
In the documentation of the file handled by the Museum Service of the Cabildo of Gran Canaria, it is specified which route the pictorial works followed since they were requisitioned by the Franco government during the civil war, directly to the owner’s home.
A report from the Cabildo stated a few months ago that returning these eighty was “a moral duty” in political life and a “duty of memory”, two signs of democratic quality. In addition, it concluded that “the heirs of Pedro Rico never lost ownership of these paintings, so that the General Administration of the State and the Cabildo of Gran Canaria were de facto mere custodians of them”.
During the Spanish Civil War, the Prado Museum held the works that, in January 1942, arrived on the island by decision of the then Civil Governor of Las Palmas, Plácido Álvarez, who requested them from the General Commissariat of the National Service for the Defense of Artistic Heritage, as part of a batch of 39 works that would make up the future Museum of Fine Arts on the island.
Thus, since 1952, these artistic works have been kept and preserved by the Casa de Colón, the most important art gallery in the archipelago to date.
The five paintings that will be returned are three oil paintings on canvas by Eugenio Lucas Velázquez (1817-1840), entitled Can cross, Majors giving gift to pole vaulter And Bull charging a group, as well as an oil on cardboard by Roberto Domingo Fallola entitled Fire Flags and a painting by Francisco Domingo Marqués, dated 1870 and entitled Musketeers: the sale of the horse.
