Spain Banknotes 50 Pesetas banknote 1951 Santiago Rusinol
Bank of Spain - Banco de España
Obverse: Portrait of Santiago Rusiñol, engraved by José Luis López Sánchez.
Reverse: "Jardines de Aranjuez", by Rusiñol (The Garden at Aranjuez - Old Faun at Royal Palace of Aranjuez, 1907 Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), engraved by José López Pavia and José Luis López Sánchez.
Watermark: Head of Santiago Rusiñol.
Size: 135 x 86 mm. Mintage: 69,500,000 notes. In circulation from 17 February 1956.
Spain Banknotes - Spain Paper Money
1951 Issue
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Santiago Rusiñol
Santiago Rusiñol i Prats (25 February 1861 – 13 June 1931) was a Spanish painter, poet, and playwright. He was one of the leaders of the Catalan modernisme movement. He influenced Pablo Picasso as a modern artist, and also left a number of modernist buildings in Sitges, a town in Catalonia.
Rusiñol was born in Barcelona in 1861, to a family of industrialists in textiles with origins in Manlleu. Despite the fact that he was the heir to the family's lucrative operations, by the time he was a teenager Rusiñol already showed a strong interest in painting and travel. His training as painter started at Centro de Acuarelistas de Barcelona under the direction of Tomás Moragas. Like so many artists of the day, he travelled to Paris in 1889, living in Montmartre with Ramon Casas and Ignacio Zuloaga.
Much of his work in Paris belonged to the Symbolism painting style. While there, he also attended the Gervex Academy, where he discovered his love for modernism. After returning to Spain, he settled in Sitges, founding a studio/museum named Cau Ferrat. When back in Barcelona, he was a frequent client of the café Els Quatre Gats, noted for its association with modernisme and the young Pablo Picasso. He went to Mallorca with the painter Joaquin Mir Trinxet, where they met the mystic Belgian painter William Degouve de Nuncques in 1899.
He was most known for his plays, and landscape and garden paintings. He died in Aranjuez in 1931 while painting its famous gardens.
Royal Palace of Aranjuez
The Royal Palace of Aranjuez (Spanish: Palacio Real de Aranjuez) is a residence of the King of Spain, located in the town of Aranjuez, Community of Madrid, Spain. The palace is open to the public as one of the Spanish royal sites.
It was commissioned by Philip II and designed by Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera, who also designed El Escorial. It was completed during the reign of Ferdinand VI by the mid-18th century; Charles III had two wings added to it.
The huge gardens, built to relieve its royal residents from the dust and drought of the Spanish meseta using the waters of the adjacent Tagus and Jarama rivers, are Spain's most important of the Habsburg period. The Jardín de la Isla is on a man-made island bounded by the River Tagus and the Ria Canal. The Jardín del Príncipe contains a miniature palace (the Casa del Labrador, built for Charles IV) and the Museo de las Falúas Reales, housing the most important extant collection of Spain's royal pleasure barges.
The Concierto de Aranjuez is a composition for classical guitar and orchestra written by Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo, who was inspired by the palace gardens. The work attempts to take the listener through sounds of nature in and around the gardens during the period in which it was written.
The palace's important art and historical collections include the Museo de la Vida en Palacio, describing the daily lives of Spain's monarchs.