Blacksmith, Pedro Alonso Ruiz had musical and artistic abilities: he was able to interpret music without partition and could draw decorative ornamental patterns and simplified symbols. Declared schizophrenic, he was committed to the psychiatric hospital in Toledo in 1916, where he spent twenty-five years. There he created orientalizing drawings — preliminary pencil drafts enhanced and enclosed in outlined frames. Later on he applied aniline inks of different colours, mostly red and turquoise. He could have been influenced by Byzantine and Persian rugs adorning the streets of his city during the procession of Corpus Christi. His works became part of the collection of the Spanish psychiatrist Gonzalo Rodríguez Lafora (1886-1971), who showed a fraction of it at the First World Psychiatric Congress in Paris in 1950.
RUIZ pedro alonso
