# VALDÉS LEAL, Juan de [View the canonical artist record]() ## Artist - Lifespan: 1622–1690 - Profession: painter - School: Spanish ## Biography Spanish painter and engraver, born in Seville, where he worked from 1656 after some early years in Cordova. With Murillo he helped to found an academy of painting there in 1660, and after Murillo's death in 1682 he was the leading artist in the city. Like Murillo, he was primarily a religious painter, but he was very different in style and approach. He had a penchant for macabre or grotesque subject-matter, and his style is characterized by feverish excitability, with a vivid sense of movement, brilliant colouring, and dramatic lighting. His most remarkable works are two large Allegories of Death \(commissioned 1672\) in the Hospital de la Caridad, Seville. He also polychromed Roldán 's great altarpiece in the Caridad. ## Related artworks - [Ascension of Elijah]() - [Assumption of the Virgin]() - [Carrying the Cross]() - [Ecce Homo]() - [Finis Gloriae Mundi]() - [Head of a Woman]() - [In Ictu Oculi]() - [Miracle of St Ildefonsus]() - [Monument to St Ferdinand]() - [St Jerome]() - [The Sacrifice of Isaac]() - [Virgin of the Immaculate Conception with Sts Andrew and John the Baptist]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()