Image: Museo de Pontevedra, Pontevedra
A major work by Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao is receiving its first presentation at Museo de Pontevedra this summer. The museum’s Edificio Castelao is showing 'A derradeira leición do mestre' from 25 June to 27 September 2026, bringing into public view the emblematic oil painting Castelao made in 1945 for the Centro Orensano de Buenos Aires. The painting has been on temporary loan for the exhibition from the collection of the Centro Galicia de Buenos Aires, which has owned it since 1979.
According to the museum, the show places the canvas in a dense historical and political framework. Castelao painted the work for the Centro Orensano in Buenos Aires, an institution that had helped make possible the publication of 'Sempre en Galiza' a year earlier. The painting was conceived in a context marked by political symbolism and was presented on the ninth anniversary of the execution of Alexandre Bóveda, the Galician nationalist and personal friend of the artist to whom the work is closely tied.
The museum says the exhibition also coincides with the 90th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War, the 1936 plebiscite on Galicia’s autonomy statute and Bóveda’s killing, underlining the painting’s historical resonance. In the scene, a body lies in a simple Galician landscape before two children. The museum identifies the victim as Bóveda, who was executed in Pontevedra on 17 August 1936. Castelao described Bóveda as a ‘prototipo da cidadanía galega e mártir da liberdade’, and the exhibition text presents the painting as both a tribute to him and a broader homage to those who gave their lives for the Republic, freedom and justice.
The work is also framed through Castelao’s wider graphic production. The museum notes that the canvas reproduces print number 6 from 'Galicia mártir', the first of the three albums he published during the war. 'Galicia mártir' was edited in Valencia in 1937 and forms, together with 'Atila en Galicia' (Valencia, 1937) and 'Milicianos' (New York, 1938), a group the museum describes as a “Guernica galego,” a key reference for anti-fascist memory. The original drawings from that series have been preserved at Museo de Pontevedra since 1981.
Museum text describes 'A derradeira leición do mestre' as a work that turns sacrifice into a symbolic and redemptive lesson. The two children in the composition are read as figures of the future and the continuity of Galicianist ideals, while the violence in the image fails to extinguish them and instead projects those ideals toward later generations. The exhibition presents the painting through a language that combines realism and symbolism and that the museum links to Francisco de Goya and to European graphic traditions of Castelao’s time.
The exhibition is curated by Mª de los Ángeles Tilve Jar. Alongside the display, the museum has announced guided visits on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 6 pm and on Saturdays at noon, as well as school-group visits in September by prior arrangement. Earlier in the run, the Edificio Castelao hosted a concert by the Coral Polifónica de Pontevedra on Saturday 27 June at 7 pm and a seminar titled 'Arte, Exilio e Memoria: Castelao, A Derradeira Leición do Mestre e a Emigración Galega en América' on Monday 22 June and Tuesday 23 June. The exhibition remains on view until 27 September.
