The Boy Who Ran Away to Paint: Moya’s First Artistic Adventure

I'm posting this from the airport, on my way to Italy to visit my family. I wish I could have squeezed in a trip to Andalusia as well, but the timing just didn't work out. That region of Spain around Priego is a wonderful place and well worth a visit! Come to think of it, it reminds me a bit of Tuscany, where I'm headed now—with its rolling hills dotted with olive groves and vineyards, and picturesque towns hiding centuries of history around every corner.

But today, I want to tell you the amusing story of how my grandfather decided to become a painter.

A Vocation That Could Not Be Ignored

There is a particular kind of artistic vocation that announces itself not as a quiet preference but as an irresistible compulsion — one that overrides parental authority, social expectation, and basic self-preservation. José Moya del Pino's calling was of this variety.

From a young age, Moya was captivated by the drawings of his uncle, a retired cavalry officer and amateur artist who liked to draw battles and subjects from Roman antiquity, and had written and illustrated a book. As José eagerly copied Tío Pepe's sketches, his curiosity about art only grew. By the age of ten, he had discovered a painter's workshop along his way to school, and would stop every day to watch the artists at work. "Paddlings for his tardiness became numerous," one biographer notes — and the paddles used by teachers in those days were sticks "studded with iron nails."

The painter, a Frenchman named Carlos Mouton, eventually invited the boy in, and the two formed a friendship. He was an itinerant painter, and to make a living spent a good portion of the year traveling through the villages of Andalusia, painting patron saints on commission. When the time came for him to set out on his next circuit through the villages, young José decided to go with him as his apprentice — without telling his parents, without permission, without a plan. He was gone for months.

Ten Months on the Road

They traveled from village to village with wagon and donkey, painting the towns’ patron saint or the saint bearing the name of any peasant who asked for it; and when Mouton didn’t know the saint’s attributes he would simply invent them. When clients couldn't pay in cash, they paid in kind: a sack of potatoes, a whole cheese, a hock of ham or two pounds of home-made smoked sausage. When they couldn't manage even that, the artist would raffle his paintings.

"[Mouton] would paint the saints with long white robes, to give them the appearance of being in their heavenly abode." (From California Art Research, Vol. XIII, by Gene Hailey) *

Moya’s specific duties were concrete: grinding pigments until they reached the right consistency and stuffing them into a casing made from pig intestines; cleaning brushes in the prescribed order; beating a drum through the streets of each new village to announce the artist's arrival. What he learned about paint and color was limited by the crude commercial nature of Mouton's practice. What he learned about life — about the relationship between art and audience, about resourcefulness, about the willingness to follow an instinct into genuinely unknown territory — was considerable.

The Aftermath

Mouton had a habit of introducing his young assistant as "the boy who could drink as much as a man," a boast that José felt obliged to live up to. When he finally came home, he was dirty, bloodshot-eyed, and wearing filthy tattered clothes. His family was appalled; they had enlisted the Civil Guard to find him.

But the episode confirmed something that could not be undone: Moya del Pino was going to be a painter. His parents, recognizing this, faced a decision. In Andalusia at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was only one place a serious young artist could pursue meaningful training. They would send him to Granada.

The ten months Moya spent with Mouton are the strangest and most formative stretch of his early life, and they deserve to be taken seriously as an education rather than dismissed as a boyhood adventure. What the itinerant painter's circuit gave Moya was something that no formal art school could have provided: an understanding of art as a trade that existed in the world, that served specific social functions, that was paid for in cash or potatoes depending on the circumstances, and that required its practitioner to show up, work fast, and satisfy a patron who was not interested in artistic self-expression.

This was, in a word, professionalism. And it is visible throughout Moya's career, in his ease with commission work, in his ability to adapt his visual language to different clients and contexts, in his willingness to paint breweries and post offices with the same seriousness he brought to royal portraits and Velázquez copies. The boy who beat a drum through Andalusian villages to announce an itinerant painter's arrival understood, at some cellular level, that art needed an audience and that finding that audience was part of the job.

His father's horror at the state in which the boy returned — dirty, bloodshot, in filthy clothes, having apparently drunk more wine than was advisable for a ten-year-old — was entirely understandable. But the horror was followed, within a relatively short time, by the decision to send José to Granada for serious training.

The story of the boy who ran away to join an itinerant painter reads almost like a fairy tale. But it also captures something essential about Moya's character: his willingness to follow aesthetic instinct wherever it led, regardless of convention — and his lifelong ability to turn even the most unpromising situation into an education.

*Image created by AI to represent a typical devotional image of a "saint in long white robes." No record survives of actual paintings by Carlos Mouton.