> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thesegovian.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Painter Across from the Alcázar - URL: https://www.thesegovian.com/the-painter-across-from-the-alcazar/ - Published: 2026-10-18T16:39:18.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-18T16:39:18.000Z - Description: Maurice Fromkes’s paintings found a lasting home in museum collections. In Segovia, the house where he lived tells a less settled story. - Author: The Segovian Editorial Team - Tags: Arts & Culture THE ARTIST · 1872–1931 ## Maurice Fromkes Born in Vilna and raised in the United States, Maurice Fromkes trained in New York and built a career as a portrait painter before moving to Spain in 1920\. He first visited Segovia with his wife, Eva, in 1921\. Their rented house near the Alcázar became both a home and a gathering place for writers and artists. His paintings now belong to collections including the Museo del Prado. ![Maurice Fromkes himself, depicted in his self-portrait, circa 1927](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Autoportrait_Fromkes.jpg) **THE ARTIST · MAURICE FROMKES (1872–1931)** Fromkes depicts himself in this *Self-Portrait*, c. 1927\. National Academy of Design, New York. Reproduction: Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Across from the entrance to the Alcázar gardens, in the plazuela de Juan Guás, a house presents a less accommodating version of the past. Photographs published in February 2025 show a partial collapse along the Pozo de la Nieve side: a breach in the boundary a dwelling is supposed to maintain between its rooms and the weather. A plaque remains on the façade. It remembers Maurice Fromkes, the American painter who lived here and loved this corner of Spain. The inscription has outlasted the household. It may yet outlast considerably more. The castle makes this an awkward place for a building to be forgotten. A monument instructs us in the business of looking. We approach it, recognise it, find an angle. A house asks for a less rehearsed attention: someone must wonder who climbed its stairs, who answered its door, what occupied the hours between breakfast and dusk. Fromkes belongs to that other history of Segovia, just beyond the customary photograph. New York, 1919\. By any reasonable professional reckoning, he has arrived. Trained at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, acquainted with European painting, he has established a portrait practice among the city’s business and social circles. The previous year, Reinhardt Galleries exhibited his portraits, figure paintings and still lifes. Oriental screens and ornaments furnished some of his compositions. These were objects selected to be seen, in rooms whose occupants were accustomed to being noticed. A commissioned portrait involves a discreet negotiation. The sitter brings a face, a position in the world and a preferred account of both. The painter must decide what can be made of the arrangement. It would be convenient to find Fromkes secretly exhausted by it all. The evidence offers no such confession. Nor had his curiosity waited for Spain: encouraged by his friend Henry Golden Dearth, he had already turned towards landscapes, street scenes and still lifes. In the autumn of 1920, he sailed for Spain and established a studio in Madrid. According to the local historian Ángel González Pieras, his first visit to Segovia followed in 1921\. Eva, his wife, came with him. They returned over several years before renting the house in Juan Guás. Affection acquired the habit of an address. ![Unfinished portrait of the painter Joaquín Mir by Maurice Fromkes](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/El_pintor_Joaqu%C3%ADn_Mir%2C_Maurice_Fromkes.jpg) **PAINTED BY FROMKES** The sitter is the painter Joaquín Mir. This unfinished portrait was painted by Maurice Fromkes, c. 1925–1930\. Museo del Prado collection. Reproduction: Wikimedia Commons, public domain. That interval matters. A first visit can survive on favourable light and the relief of being elsewhere. Returning submits a place to less generous conditions. There are ordinary afternoons to account for, familiar streets, the gradual disappearance of novelty. A city that continues to hold a painter’s attention after that has become something more demanding than a view. The house’s surroundings offered the Vera Cruz, the Parral and Zamarramala; the eye could leave the upper city and follow the ground towards the valley. Here, buildings were separated by stretches of air and terrain. The Alcázar was close, but it did not exhaust the prospect. Beyond its emphatic silhouette lay a landscape that gave the gaze somewhere to go. No surviving evidence consulted for this account establishes that a particular window persuaded Fromkes to take the house. Yet a window need not have a legend attached to it to matter. Seen repeatedly, a prospect changes its terms. A wall loses the colour it seemed to possess yesterday. A shadow alters the weight of a building. What a traveller remembers as the light of Castile becomes, for a painter who stays, a succession of practical questions. In Spain, Fromkes painted women and children, people whose presence did not depend on the familiar theatrical shorthand of Spanishness. The National Academy’s biography distinguishes his subjects from the bullfighters and flamenco dancers an overseas audience might have expected. In 1924, the National Museum of Modern Art acquired his *Madonna of the Road*. Public men continued to sit for him. The Prado’s collection includes his portraits of Miguel de Unamuno, Gabriel Miró, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Manuel Bartolomé Cossío and Joaquín Mir. There was no simple exchange of Manhattan’s prosperous faces for anonymous rural ones. The work admits several kinds of standing, several ways of occupying a room. A reputation may explain why a portrait was commissioned. It cannot, by itself, explain what holds us before it. ![Miguel de Unamuno, painted by Maurice Fromkes](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Retrato_de_Miguel_de_Unamuno_%28Museo_del_Prado%29.jpg) **PAINTED BY FROMKES** The writer Miguel de Unamuno, portrayed by Maurice Fromkes. Museo del Prado collection, on deposit at the Museo de Salamanca. Wikimedia Commons, public domain. ![Gustavo Pittaluga, painted by Maurice Fromkes](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Gustavo_Pittaluga_Fattorini_%28Museo_del_Prado%29.jpg) **PAINTED BY FROMKES** The physician Gustavo Pittaluga, portrayed by Maurice Fromkes. Museo del Prado collection. Wikimedia Commons, public domain. At home, Eva supplied another kind of attention. Her summer gatherings brought together young writers and artists, among them Alfredo Marqueríe, Luis Felipe de Peñalosa, Dionisio Ridruejo and Juan Francisco Cáceres. Zenobia Camprubí and Isabel Oyarzábal also appear among the visitors recorded by González Pieras. Eva called the young people her *children*. The English word lends an unexpected domestic scale to the account: a foreign hostess, writers still finding their footing, an afternoon with somewhere to continue. To remember Eva is to furnish the house again. The plaque gives us the painter; the gatherings restore other people to the rooms. A building can become difficult to save when it has become difficult to imagine inhabited. Its windows turn into architectural details. Its address becomes a footnote. The life that once made the place necessary recedes behind the name intended to preserve it. Fromkes died in Paris in 1931\. His paintings have titles, dimensions and inventory numbers. The Prado’s catalogue supplies the particulars by which a work can be identified and found again. There is something reassuringly unromantic about that precision. A person has undertaken to keep track. ![Stone benches and a central fountain beneath tall trees in the Mauricio Fromkes Garden, Segovia](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Segovia_-_44817952041.jpg) The Mauricio Fromkes Garden, photographed in 2018\. Photo: [Person-with-No Name / JingKe888](https://www.flickr.com/photos/jingke888/44817952041/), via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Segovia%5F-%5F44817952041.jpg) · [CC BY 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/). A short walk away on Calle Velarde, the city has made room for a gentler kind of remembrance. The Mauricio Fromkes Garden opened in 1958, twenty-seven years after his death. Four paths meet around a fountain and stone benches; beyond the railing, the Eresma valley opens towards the Royal Mint and the monastery of El Parral. His name belongs here to a place where people can linger. Go there with a little time to spare. Sit down before taking a photograph. Let the buildings across the valley separate themselves from the trees; watch where the light settles, then notice where it has moved. The garden came after Fromkes, so these are not seats we can claim he occupied. What survives is the possibility of attending to a landscape he knew. From the bench, one might begin to imagine the pleasure of returning to it, and the patience required to make something of that pleasure in paint. **PAUSE HERE** Jardín de Mauricio Fromkes · Calle Velarde, 12, Segovia. Free admission; Turismo de Segovia lists the garden as open throughout the day. [Visitor information →](https://turismodesegovia.com/en/nature/patrimonio-natural/gardens/mauricio-fromkes-garden) The house has its own vocabulary of survival. In the February 2025 report, the municipality described its condition as *ruina consolidada*: an established ruin, without an imminent risk of collapse. The privately owned property had been intended for rehabilitation; the work had stalled. Official language could distinguish an emergency from deterioration permitted to wait. Weather makes no comparable distinction. A portrait asks us to stop before a face whose owner has long since left the room. Across from the Alcázar, the question is whether anyone will stop long enough before the room itself. The plaque remembers a painter who loved Segovia. Beneath it, the house awaits an answer that cannot be engraved in stone. **Sources and further reading** [National Academy of Design: Maurice Fromkes](https://nationalacademy.emuseum.com/people/1401/maurice-fromkes) · [Museo del Prado](https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/artista/fromkes-maurice/60ebb82f-09f1-4361-bb50-578c0f1c902d) [Ángel González Pieras: Fromkes, el yanqui de Segovia](https://eladelantado.com/segovia/2021/06/13/fromkes-el-yanqui-de-segovia/) · [Eva Fromkes and Segovia’s cultural life](https://eladelantado.com/segovia/2021/05/09/la-feminista-que-propulso-el-turismo-en-segovia/) [The house: reporting published on 20 February 2025](https://eladelantado.com/segovia/2025/02/20/la-casa-de-maurice-fromkes-en-segovia-una-joya-artistica-en-ruinas/)