Jose Arpa. When Jose Arpa y Perea arrived in San Antonio, Texas in 1899, he had already established himself as an accomplished portrait and landscape painter in both Europe and the Americas.

Born in 1858 in Carmona, Spain to Ma. de Gracia Perea and Antonio Arpa, a shoemaker, Jose Arpa began his formal artistic education at the age of eighteen. He enrolled at the Escuela de Belles Artes, Seville, where he acquired a foundation in the formal academic arts, and was later taught by Eduardo Cano and Manuel Wssel. He traveled to Italy in 1883, where he won the prestigious Prix de Rome for three consecutive years (1884-1886).

During his stay in Italy, his art began to evolve from the academic models he learned from Cano, into a natural, en plein air style. Evidenced through his landscapes, he began to meld tenets of realism with those of en plein air, through rapid execution and a flowing, natural hand.

Arpa returned to Spain in 1886, where he remained until 1896, maintaining a studio in Gerona. During this period he established himself as an accomplished artist; traveling and exhibiting his paintings throughout Europe, Africa and the Americas.

In 1895, he went to Mexico to teach painting at the National Academy of Fine Arts in San Carlos at the behest of the Mexican government. After arriving, Arpa declined the position but remained in Mexico, painting a series of landscapes in Jalapa and Coatepec, as well as urban and domestic subjects. From there he traveled to San Antonio in 1899, and during the following year participated in the International Fair of Art in San Antonio. He exhibited a painting entitled "Mexican Funeral", which the Boston Museum later purchased for $12,000. His visits to San Antonio enabled him to make the aquaintances of the photographer Ernst Raba, and the artists Robert Onderdonk and his son, Julian Onderdonk; important figures in the San Antonio art community. From 1900 to the 1920's, Arpa traveled frequently between Mexico and San Antonio, eventually settling in the latter region in 1923. During the first part of the century, he exhibited not only in San Antonio and Mexico, but in Dallas, in New York at the National Academy of Design (1903), and in Spain at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts of Madrid (1904) and at the National Exhibition of Fine and Industrial Arts, Seville.

He established the Arpa School of Painting in San Antonio in 1923, assisted later by his nephew, the artist Xavier Gonzales. He continued to exhibit frequently, at museums and galleries throughout Texas as well as New York and Spain. In 1926, he began to teach en plein air classes in Bandera, Texas.

In 1927, at the Edgar B. Davis Wildflower Competition in San Antonio, an important national art competition, Arpa won the Texas prize and a purse of $1,000 for his painting of "Verbenas". That same year he opened a new studio at the Vance House on Nueva Street. At the 1928 Edgar B. Davis Competition, Arpa entered "Cactus Flowers", for which he won third prize. In May of 1928 he exhibited landscapes of Arizona and Texas at the Salon of the American Painters, Anderson Galleries, New York. For the next Davis Competition in 1929 and also the last, Arpa exhibited "Picking Cotton" and won first prize.