(b Quesada, Jaén, Nov 6, 1907; d Quesada, Jaén, Feb 11, 1960). Spanish painter . He came from a wealthy family of landowners and in 1924 began his artistic training at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. He made his first trip to Paris in 1934, returning there on several occasions, but continued to take his native village, Quesada, as the basic subject of his work. After the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) he embarked on a period of intense artistic activity, holding his first one-man exhibition (Madrid, Gal. Biosca, 1942) and winning the support of Eugenio d’Ors. From 1943 he participated in exhibitions organized by d’Ors for the Academia Breve de Crítica de Arte, and after visiting Barcelona in 1945 he remained in close contact with Catalan cultural circles, exhibiting regularly in the region from 1947. Zabaleta familiarized himself with contemporary tendencies in painting, notably Cubism and Surrealism, and established contact with their practitioners; he was a great admirer of Picasso, whom he knew. Taking Quesada, the Sierra de Cazorla and the people of the Andalusian countryside as the subject-matter of paintings such as ...