Francisco Antolínez y Ochoa

Spanish painter. A lawyer by training, he continued his profession while practicing as a painter and was well educated in the humanities. Although he was a prolific artist, few of his paintings are signed; only one, the Adoration of the Shepherds (1678; Seville Cathedral, Sacristia de los Cálices), bears his name. This painting is characteristic of his style, depicting small, highly expressive figures in a setting with dramatic lighting effects. Antolínez painted spacious interior scenes and landscapes, always featuring small figures in lively attitudes. He specialized in modestly sized pictures, usually in series of eight or ten paintings of religious subjects, to which he gave a pleasing decorative effect by the addition of landscape backgrounds. Most of them were evidently painted in haste with an eye to a quick sale. His output includes many scenes of episodes from the lives of Jacob (Seville Cathedral, sacristy), Abraham and David from the Old Testament, scenes from the life of the Virgin, and New Testament scenes of the childhood of Christ (Madrid, Colegio S Anton) and of the life of Christ (Fuentes el Año, parish church). Many of these series have been dispersed into numerous different locations. Antolínez is thought to have been related to the painter José Antolínez, who may have been his brother or his uncle. Bibliography D. Angulo Iñiguez: Pintura del siglo XVII, A. Hisp., xv (Madrid, 1971), p. 384 D. Angulo Iñiguez: Murillo y su escuela (Seville, 1975), p. 8 E. Valdivieso: Historia de la pintura sevillana (Seville, 1986), p. 229 A. E. Pérez Sánchez: Pintura barroca española (Madrid, 1992), p. 382 Enrique Valdivièso

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