Francisco Bores. Gouaches for Poe’s The Raven

The museum presents an exhibition on the series of gouaches that Francisco Bores (Madrid, 1898-Paris, 1972) painted in the first half of the 1960s to illustrate the poem The Raven (1845) by Edgar Allen Poe. Unpublished until recently, these twelve gouaches are now exhibited for the first time alongside a canvas of the same period entitled Summer Landscape (1965).

In contrast to the most celebrated of Poe’s illustrators, such as Édouard Manet and Gustave Doré, Bores eliminated any narrative element. His images of the raven, either alone or with Lenore, recall those of the Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, but deploy a more lyrical and sensual idiom. In these works Bores achieved the maximum degree of expressivity. In comparison to his oil paintings, which are more precisely conceived, these allowed him greater room for experimentation and it could be said that the Madrid-born painter felt freer and particularly at ease when using this technique. In addition, the transparency and matte quality of gouache allowed him to obtain a subtle and harmonious luminosity. In both the illustrations on display in the exhibition and in the rest of his oeuvre Bores remained true to his conviction that “truth should be expressed in a moderate tone.”