Leonardo Alenza y Nieto (6 November 1807, Madrid – 30 June 1845, Madrid) was a Spanish painter and engraver in the Romantic style; associated with the Costumbrista movement.

Biography
Son of Valentín Alenza Recuenco, a native of Madrid, and María Nieto Sánchez, a native of Ávila. The couple lived on the second floor of number 18 of the Cava Baja, street that was very famous then for the number of inns there was in it. His father was an employee at the Secretariat of Pharmacy, fond of poetry, and he even published some poems in the Diario de Madrid, while his mother was likely to die by 1813, Leonardo being six or seven years old.

Studies
Leonardo’s father married again in 1817 with Micaela Bertrandi, a woman barely eleven years older than her son, and the family moved to the Calle de los Estudios, next to the convent of the Jesuits, in whose Imperial College of San Isidro probably studied Leonardo the first letters, being fellow among others of Ventura de la Vega and Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch.

From there he went in 1819 to study drawing in the Merced studio of the Academy of San Fernando, which was in the convent of La Merced; and he was ascending quickly, going to the academy classes on the Calle de Alcalá at the age of sixteen. His professors were successively the painter Cástor González Velázquez, the engraver Vicente Peleguer, the sculptor Francisco Elías Vallejo, the painter José Maea, the sculptor Esteban de Agreda, the sculptor Pedro Hermoso, the painter Zacarías González Velázquez and, finally, for six years, the also painter José Madrazo. In the class of the latter he will coincide with his son Federico Madrazo, and with José Elbo, José María Avrial and Luis Ferrant Llausas.

It left definitively of the classrooms of the Academy in 1833, year in which it realized by order of the City council of Madrid an Allegorical picture to the swearing-in and proclamation of queen Isabel II and shortly after, and by order of the Crown, another with the title of Dª María la Grande calms the rebellion of Segovia with her eloquence and makes them recognize and open the doors of the city to their son’s king. The following year he painted for the cenotaph erected on the occasion of the funeral of Ferdinand VII up to five large paintings in grisaille.

First works
Begin with these official commissions a career that will focus primarily on their participation in the annual exhibition that made the Academy for San Mateo.

The year 1837 witnesses several events marking romantic flavor: premieres at the Coliseo Prince drama lovers of Teruel of Hartzenbusch, published the student of Salamanca of Espronceda, see the light the first verses of José Zorrilla in the Artist and Mariano José de Larra commits suicide. In that year, Leonardo Alenza begins to illustrate with his drawings the Spanish Picturesque Weekly of Mesonero Romanos and presents six caprices in the exhibition of the Academy. In 1839, two of these capricesthey will be titled The Romantics; they are the later known as suicides of the current Museum of Romanticism in Madrid. That same year he stopped working with the Spanish Picturesque Weekly to illustrate new editions of the picaresque novel Gil Blas and the complete works of Quevedo, as well as to address the decoration of public places: the Café de Levante and the Quiroga store.

But all this stops the disease. At the beginning of 1842 he applied for the title of Academician of Merit at the Academy of San Fernando while tuberculosis had made a dent in his body and acknowledged that “I had so broken health that I had to leave Madrid to be able to recover.” Finally, on November 6, 1842, the same day he turned thirty-five years old, Alenza became a scholar of merit for history painting, presenting a picture far removed from his sensitivity and way of doing things, as is the David cutting the head of Goliath.

New illustrations for the edition of The Spaniards painted by themselves, collaborations in the press or participation in the exhibition of the Academy, in which he became a professor for a few months, mark his final stage. In 1844 he participated in the exhibition of the Academy with twelve paintings of customs and a portrait, but he was already so seriously ill that he lived in the Casa de Vacas del Retiro, because it was thought that the effluvia of the cows were beneficial to fight the disease.

Final
Like Bécquer, Rosales or Alfonso XII, Alenza died of tuberculosis at dawn on June 30, 1845 at his house at number 5 in the Plaza de San Ildefonso, the third and last house where he lived in Madrid. He was buried in a niche of the cemetery of San Ginés and San Luis thanks to the opening of a subscription among his friends that prevented his remains from passing into the common grave that were the six courtyards he had.

Work
His paintings are preserved in the Museo del Prado, San Fernando Academy, Romanticism Museum, Municipal Museum, Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Ateneo, Museo Cerralbo, Bilbao Fine Arts Museum or Museum of Budapest. There are also good collections of his drawings in the National Library, 466 in total. A dozen watercolors and more than two hundred drawings, among them about 40 preserved in the funds of the Lázaro Galdiano Museum and smaller collections in the Romantic Museum (55), in the Prado (21) or in the Municipal of Madrid (10). Also, as an engraver, in 1840 he signed a series of etchings entitled Caprichoswith costumbristas scenes, and realized at least a lithography with diverse groups of majos and manolas. Since the second half of the nineteenth century has dedicated a street in the neighborhood of Rios Rosas Chamberí district of Madrid.

Source from Wikipedia