Artists’ archives and document collections are essential in understanding both their creative context and the interest and motivations of those who assembled them. Sketches, correspondence, photographs, written texts and other materials that belonged to the artists or the people near them help us to learn more about their lives and shed light on their most personal concerns.

The museum is now presenting six sets of documents, some of them associated with recent acquisitions, on the painter Eduardo Zamacois; the photographer Alphonse Guiard and his son, the painter Adolfo Guiard; the photographer Felipe Manterola; the photographic archive of the Patricio Echeverría S.A. factory; the illustrator Saul Steinberg; and the painter and engraver María Franciska Dapena.

Their recent addition is the outcome of donations made by their heirs and other private collections, the latest in the series of donations and bequests that have historically enriched the museum’s collections.

New collections

The representative artworks by the painter Eduardo Zamacois conserved at the museum—nine paintings and four drawings—are now joined by important document materials from his descendants. Similarly, the outstanding representation of Adolfo Guiard—eleven paintings and seventeen drawings—is now being expanded with the addition of documents, letters, fifty photographs and forty-six sketches of his works, along with albumen silver prints by his father Alphonse Guiard, a photography pioneer in the Basque Country, as well as correspondence with his brother, the historian and writer Teófilo Guiard.

Likewise, the museum is now welcoming the complete photographic collections of Felipe Manterola and the Patricio Echeverría company. The former reflects a genuine view of the Basque rural environment through the photographs that Manterola took in the first three decades of the twentieth century in Arratia Valley. The Echeverría collection, in turn, documents the rise of industry in the country throughout the twentieth century. The donation from The Saul Steinberg Foundation allows the museum to share the collection of one of the best illustrators in the twentieth century. Finally, the art and document collection related to María Franciska Dapena sheds new light on her figure and her political and social commitment.