Scenes of Gaucho Life in the province of Entre Rios is the heading of the catalogue of the painters’ exhibition held in the Circulo Ecuestre of Barcelona in 1929.
An equestrian club was indeed the fitting background for these scenes of Gaucho life. Without their horses, the Conquistadores could not have conquered South America. Their horses gave them almost the same advantage over the natives, los naturales (an unpleasing word in either language), that aeroplanes give us today.
Silent and dignified, hospitable, bloodthirsty, simple and yet full of a subtly born of the exigencies of his life, living alone, but for his wife and children, over whom he exercised an absolute authority, the Gaucho was indeed the monarch of the plains.
Incredulous and at the same time superstitious, easily moved to anger, and as easily appeased, after having conquered the vast plains, and carried some vestiges of Spanish culture to the desert, he fell an easy victim to the scheming politicians who replaced the rule of Spain. Working on his love of individual liberty, they made him the instrument of their various tyrannies.
It was reserved for Bernaldo de Quirós to paint the Gaucho of older days, in the dress that he wore, and above all to draw his horse decked in its silver trappings, with its high crested mane, that turns its head towards its master. Ricardo Rojas has well said that the art of Quirós is ‘an evocation of an older Argentina, on account of its subjects, and of the eternal Argentina, by its spirit’.