Xavier Desparmet Fitz-Gerald

Xavier Desparmet Fitz-Gerald was born in 1861 at Béguey, near Cadillac in the Gironde, into a Bordeaux family of Irish descent. He trained as a painter and worked in Bordeaux, painting landscapes and genre scenes: the banks of the Garonne at Lormont and Bordeaux, quiet river views with boats and fishermen, and, during a stay in Algeria around 1895 to 1900, North African subjects. His paintings are held by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, and a bust of him was made by the sculptor Lucien Schnegg.

He painted in a fine, even, silvery manner that belongs to the late plein-air tradition of the south-west, closer to the Bordeaux school of the 1880s than to Impressionism.

Desparmet Fitz-Gerald’s lasting reputation rests on his scholarship. A passionate student of Spanish painting, he spent decades on Francisco Goya and published L’Œuvre peint de Goya in Paris between 1928 and 1950, the first attempt at a complete catalogue of Goya’s paintings, with hundreds of plates; it remains a reference in the Goya literature and is cited by museums and auction houses to this day. He also wrote as an art critic and owned Spanish pictures himself.

He spent his last years in the Basque Country and died at Hendaye in 1941.