Benigno de la Vega-Inclán y Flaquer (Valladolid 1858 – Madrid 1942, second marquis of the Vega-Inclán 1898) was born into an important monarchist family of military officers. Successively an unsuccessful painter, sailor, army officer, writer, entrepreneur and broker, he eventually found his way late in life as an international art dealer specialized in Spanish old masters.
Vega-Inclán first achieved fame in 1907, when he graciously offered the Casa-Museo del Greco to the Spanish state. He had bought several houses in Toledo held in legend to be the home and workshop of the famous Cretan painter. Vega-Inclán had one rebuilt and decorated in quasi-16th-century style to house several of El Greco’s paintings that were scattered around the city along with the ones the Marquis owned himself. King Alfonso XIII inaugurated the museum in 1910. Toledo thus became a mandatory stop for foreign dignitaries visiting Madrid, with the marquis himself acting as cicerone for the most eminent visitors (such as France’s President Poincaré in 1913 and the Belgian royal couple in 1924). When showing visitors around the city he parroted the ideas of the institucionistas, reformist scholars grouped around the “Free Institution for Teaching” (Institución Libre de Enseñanza) that was run by his good friend Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, an education reformer and El Greco expert. For them, El Greco was “the most accurate painter of the race’s soul and the Spanish soil”, and Toledo was “a living museum of the nation”, and “a compendium of the history and art of the Spanish civilization”.
Profiting from the attention garnered by his gift and his family connections, Vega-Inclán joined the Liberal party. He was obtained a deputy seat in parliament but showed little interest in politics and even less patience for assembly procedures (deputy 1910-14, senator for life in 1914). Alfonso XIII then created a position tailored for Vega-Inclán: Royal Commissioner for Tourism and Popular Culture (Comisaria Regia de Turismo y Cultura Popular, or CRT, 1911-28), where he was placed in charge of promoting tourism, enhancing the travel sector, protecting the national heritage, spreading the arts, and strengthening relationships with the Americas.
The CRT was one of the earliest national tourism offices in the world. Although it was burdened from the outset by meagre funding, the Royal Commissioner’s personal limitations and the ambiguous position it occupied between the government and the palace, the CRT soon largely became more of an unofficial secretary of cultural affairs of the Crown than a state agency.
While Vega-Inclán showed little interest in the business side of his duties and neglected the private interests of the sector, he displayed remarkable awareness of the political potential of tourism in branding the national character and improving Spain’s reputation. At the beginning of the 20th century, a perceived lack of patriotism among Spaniards and poor reputation abroad featured prominently in the anxieties of Spanish intellectuals attempting to come to terms with the Crisis del ’98.
CRT flourished in the pre-1914 years. In 1912 Vega-Inclán was sent to the USA to assess whether Spain should participate in the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco, 1915). He toured up and down both coasts, where he was fêted by high society and the authorities, this being the first official visit of a state representative since the Spanish-American War almost fifteen years earlier. Following the recommendation of the marquis, the Spanish diplomatic delegation in Washington was upgraded to embassy status. Moreover, the observations that Vega-Inclán made during his tour generated a stream of “cultural transfers” between the US and Spain in the fields of hospitality industry, musealization and interior design. The Paradores (a network of state-owned hotels started by the CRT in 1928), Historic House Museums (El Greco, Cervantes, Romántico), and the historicist interior design a la castellana were all highly influenced by his American sojourn. Equally, the CRT’s projects contributed to the rise in popularity in the United States of the Spanish Colonial Revival Style during the 1920s, made famous by architects such as George Washington Smith.
Another of the marquis’ key accomplishments was his editorial work. The CRT produced a wide range of affordable publications ranging from works of Cervantes to postcards. The collection El Arte en España, started in 1913, is a particular standout. It was even continued beyond Vega-Inclan’s death in 1942. This “Library for the popularization of the national art” was comprised of approximately thirty short, illustrated editions in three languages written by renowned Spanish specialists about the primary national monuments (overwhelmingly Castilian) and painters. The CRT kept a portion of each publication to distribute in schools and among the foreign contacts of the marquis (e.g. the “Hispanic Society of America”).
Regarding the historic preservation of architecture, Vega-Inclán was a strong adherent of the Ruskinian approach to conservation over the more widespread interventionist principles of Viollet-le-Duc. He carried out two main conservation projects, one on the 14th-century El Transito synagogue in Toledo (1912) and another on an Almohade court of the Moorish royal palace of Seville, the Patio del Yeso del Alcázar (1914). The latter was explicitly planned to provide an empirical demonstration of the conservative approach to preserving arabesque decoration, in contrast with the controversial works undertaken at the Alhambra. Both of his conservation projects, together with the reinvention of a traditional Andalusian neighbourhood in the old Santa Cruz ghetto in Seville (1912-20), were inspired by the institucionista conception of Spain as melting pot for Christian, Muslim and Jewish culture.
The marquis was a deep-dyed monarchist conservative with bohemian hues: he associated with the officialist artists of the moment (Sorolla, Benlliure) and maintained distance from the radical Spanish painters of Paris. Welcomed in both the palatine aristocratic circles and the academic sphere of the progressive institucionistas, he served as a bridge between the two worlds. He also served as a central node in networks of international collectors and dealers of Spanish art. Besides his own transactions (the founder of the Casa-Museo del Greco sold, or brokered the sale, of around twenty paintings by El Greco on foreign markets) he often introduced foreign buyers – American millionaires and important international art dealers and gallery owners – to Spanish aristocrats interested in selling their pieces.
The magnus opus of the CRT took the form of a London exhibition ostensibly organized to promote Spanish tourism in the summer of 1914. Under the guise of fostering tourism, the exhibition became the hub for of a propaganda campaign to attract foreign investors to the Spanish markets, to improve Spain’s dismal international reputation and to draw the country closer to the Triple Entente. The exhibition ultimately proved to be a failure due to general lack of interest in the venture, inexperienced and inept organizers, and controversy generated by the exhibition’s portrayal of Spain.
Vega-Inclán was never able to overcome the fiasco. First he was rejected by politicians, then he was ignored by dictator Primo de Rivera (1923-30). Although the king always supported him, funding for the Comisaria Regia de Turismo agonizingly trickled to a halt until the agency was shut down in 1928. Despite his tarnished reputation, Vega-Inclán did manage to open the Casa de Cervantes in Valladolid, largely by virtue of the momentum the project had gathered before the London exhibition, as part of the celebrations of the third centenary of Cervantes’ death in 1916. The CRT slowed to a minimum, mainly involving editorial activity with two important exceptions: the opening of a museum and an inn.
First, in 1924, the Marquis opened in Madrid what was perhaps the first Museo Romántico. A product of Vega-Inclán’s nostalgia for his own childhood and personal attachment to an age that had largely fallen into scorn, the marquis combined family heritage and 19th-century art to create the museum’s domestic ambiance.
Then, in 1928, soon after the Comisaria Regia de Turismo was replaced by a modern state tourism office, the Patronato Nacional del Turismo (PNT), the CRT’s final project for Alfonso XIII was inaugurated: the Parador de Gredos, an inn and hunting pavilion in the mountains of Gredos, or “the backbone of Spain” as Miguel de Unamuno described them. The PNT continued the idea by creating a network of state-owned lodges known as Paradores across the country, of which nearly one hundred still exist today.
Vega-Inclán, in the meantime, was sent into retirement against his will. Faithful to his monarchist and authoritarian inclinations, he sided with Francisco Franco during the Spanish war and unsuccessfully attempted, as an octogenarian, to obtain a position in the new state. At his death in 1942 he was praised in the main newspaper of the Fascist Falange: “Spain has lost one of his best propagandists.”
Always a source of controversy, Vega-Inclán is currently seen by some as a progressive liberal scholar, and as a traditionalist Catholic officer by others. Commemorated by the state through the Vega-Inclán Foundation, recent research is playing down his tourism management and highlighting his role in selling Spanish masterpieces on the foreign market. Undoubtedly, Vega-Inclán was a pioneer who understood the political potential of tourism. He was one of the main actors behind the cultural agenda of official nationalism under the reign of Alfonso XIII, a monarchist programme that combined the progressive approach of the institucionistas with militaristic values. Vega-Inclán, a key figure in Spanish national culture, used an impressive range of channels to advance the agenda of Spanish nationalism.
