Calle León Bonnat
Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat (Bayonne, 1833 – Monchy-Saint-Éloi, 1922), a French painter trained in Madrid between 1846 and 1853 at the Royal Academy of San Fernando under José and Federico de Madrazo. He was a professor and director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and in 1901 opened in Bayonne the museum that bears his name, now the Musée Bonnat-Helleu.
The painter who gives this Fuente del Berro street its name was Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat, born in Bayonne in 1833, but much of his vocation was shaped in Madrid. His father, a bookseller, moved the business to the Spanish capital in 1846, and there the young Bonnat began looking at paintings in earnest.
In 1848 he entered the fine arts school of the Royal Academy of San Fernando, where he was trained by José and Federico de Madrazo. What truly marked his eye were his visits to the Prado, before the canvases of Velázquez and Ribera. His father’s death, in 1853, took him back to France, where his career fully took off after he exhibited the portrait of Adolphe Thiers at the 1877 Salon.
He taught at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1882 and came to direct it in 1905. Through his studio passed Toulouse-Lautrec, Caillebotte and the future Cubist Braque. In 1891 he announced to his native Bayonne that he would give it 374 paintings and nearly eighteen hundred drawings. The collection opened to the public in 1901 and can still be seen today at the Musée Bonnat-Helleu.