Pedro Alonso Ruíz, a blacksmith by trade, also revealed remarkable musical and artistic talents. He was able to perform music without sheet notation and displayed a keen sensitivity for drawing. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he was admitted in 1916 to the psychiatric hospital in Toledo, where he remained for twenty-five years.
During his confinement, he produced a series of Orientalist drawings distinguished by delicate pencil compositions enclosed within carefully structured borders. He later enriched these works with aniline inks in vibrant hues, predominantly turquoise and red. His visual language may have been inspired by the Byzantine and Persian carpets that decorated the streets of his hometown during the Corpus Christi procession.
His works became part of the collection of the Spanish psychiatrist Gonzalo Rodríguez Lafora, who presented a selection of them in 1950 at the First World Congress of Psychiatry in Paris.