# Cecilio Plá y Gallardo artist context and auction value notes

Canonical page: https://appraisily.com/artist/cecilio-pla-y-gallardo/
Profile generated: 2026-05-23T18:16:00.000Z
Quality: high confidence, strong sources

## Artist identity

- Birth date: 1860-11-22
- Death date: 1934-01-01
- Nationality: Spanish
- Movements: Spanish academic and luminist painting, late 19th–early 20th century
- Common media: oil on canvas, oil on panel, illustration

## About Cecilio Plá y Gallardo

Cecilio Plá y Gallardo (1860–1934) was a Spanish painter and illustrator born in Valencia and later active in Madrid. Working across portraiture and genre painting, Plá produced canvases that reflect the academic and luminist currents in Spanish art during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is recorded in major reference works including Bénézit's Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres and Thieme/Becker's Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler. Plá also taught; among his documented pupils is the painter José Gutiérrez Solana. His work is catalogued by the RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History, the Getty Union List of Artist Names, and the Virtual International Authority File. With 285 documented auction appearances, Plá's paintings and illustrations surface regularly in the secondary market, where portraits and figurative genre scenes are the most commonly offered categories.

## Common works and media

Cecilio Plá y Gallardo is best known for oil-on-canvas paintings, particularly portraits and figurative genre scenes depicting everyday Spanish life. His output also includes illustrations for publications. Works are typically executed in oil on canvas or panel and range from cabinet-size paintings to larger exhibition-scale canvases. Signed examples appear more frequently at auction than unsigned works. Reproductive prints or engravings after his compositions may also circulate in the secondary market, though these are less common than original paintings.

## Market and appraisal context

Cecilio Plá y Gallardo's works appear at public auction primarily within the nineteenth-century European and Spanish painting categories. Portraits and genre scenes are the most frequently offered formats. When evaluating works attributed to Plá, appraisers consider provenance documentation, condition, signature presence and legibility, subject matter appeal within the Spanish art market, and any exhibition or literature records. Some authority files list 1859 as his birth year rather than 1860, reflecting conflicting catalogue entries rather than identity ambiguity. Comparable auction results from Spanish and international houses provide useful benchmarks. As with many painters of this period, attribution confidence is strengthened when a work can be tied to known exhibition history or cited in standard reference volumes.

## Appraisily data basis

This artist page draws on identity records from the Getty Union List of Artist Names, the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), Wikidata, the Library of Congress Name Authority File, and the RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History, combined with auction records, sale dates, realized prices, and comparable lots when those records are available. Appraisily artist pages integrate structured entity research with market data to support appraisal and attribution decisions.

## Sources

- RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/63751
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5056499
- VIAF: https://viaf.org/viaf/47635535/
- Getty Vocabulary Program: https://vocab.getty.edu/page/ulan/500118216
- Library of Congress: https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n99253600
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilio_Pl%C3%A1