Within the Argentine polo community, a new star has been born— not on the polo field, however, but along the sidelines where he takes photographs to inspire the painter’s art.

To interview 34-year old Esteban Diaz Mathé as he talks about himself (in his second language, English), time and again he conjures up not so much a life story as the plot of a romantic novel.

Let us go back to the beginning, to the dawn of the 19th century. As he tells it, his forebears—poor but determined to prosper—migrated from Spain to Argentina to begin a modest business. The business soon flourished so that their descendants began marrying into a landed family. Eventually they acquired their own estancia near the town of Lincoln, some 200 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. As Esteban tells it, spans thousands of hectares supporting thousands of cattle.

“I had a privileged upbringing because I was born into a family which could offer us so many opportunities,” he explains. He was educated in Buenos Aires as were his three elder brothers each of whom now pays his way in an occupation of his own choice, whether engineering, banking or the economy.

Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Esteban matriculated into the University Del Salvador from where he graduated in psychology. “Then I switched to architecture and joined a firm where I specialized in human resources. As a hobby I started drawing and discovered my gift for art. From drawing with a pen I went to charcoal and then to paint and I copied prints of the great masters, Michelangelo, de Vinci, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and the Spanish painter Joaquin Sarolla.’’ (1863-1923, famous for his landscapes and portraits.)

“The Buenos Aires art community encouraged me to become an artist. I had my doubts but people were buying my paintings, so I gave up architecture to become a traveling artist. I began on the family estancia. As a child I had returned there for three months every summer. I enjoyed the hunting and the fly-fishing in Patagonia but my first love was the gauchos and their horses. To me they were a dream. They were my friends and my father-figures. At dawn each morning they would call for me with a horse and I would ride with them all day. They’re still my friends, though many have since retired.’’

And the gauchos? In their affinity for horses, cattle and wide open spaces, they are coupled with North American cowboys but there the similarity ends. Where Hollywood arms Wild West cowboy with “six-shooters,’’ the gauchos’ chosen weapon was el facon, a long-bladed sharp-edged knife for fighting and for any other purpose.

As to their genesis in the 17th century they were the offspring of Spanish colonizers and indigenous Indian women, a subject people, viewed by their colonial masters as layabouts and trouble-makers albeit over time increasingly admired for their skill with horses and cattle. Estancias have now long been fenced but their patrons (owners) still employ gauchos to manage their cattle, though with their nomadic instincts now in check. In Argentina’s intermittent wars throughout the 19th century to end Spanish imperial rule, the role of gauchos in Argentine cavalry won the admiration of their homeland, now celebrated annually in rodeos and cultural festivals, a legacy to which Esteban Diaz Mathé is clearly in thrall.

Seven years ago he widened his vision to Argentina as a whole, hosted by estancia patrons, some 40 in all, in 10 of Argentina’s 23 provinces. The many photographs he took as he explored his homeland were never meant to be copied as paintings. They were intended in their variety to offer suggestions in their light and color and the facial expressions of gauchos and their horses, adding or deleting photographic details, to enhance his artworks, a practise he continues.

Together with a bilingual text written by Mariano Fernandez, a freelance pastoral journalist (otherwise contributing to livestock pastoral magazines the world over), in 2012 Esteban published his first book of artworks, “Ser Argentino” (Being Argentine). As the cover-flap tells us, “Gathering information, investigating and sharing his daily work with rural people, Esteban Mathé seeks to capture through his paintings the very essence of the national being.’’ To promote Argentina to the world, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs distributed copies of “Ser Argentino” to its 80 its embassies worldwide. A further 3,000 copies were sold to Buenos Aires banks and business houses.

Esteban freely acknowledges that the credit due for his success goes to his wife Florencia, a lawyer by profession, whom he met by chance during his first journey across Argentina. “She is the love of my life,” he declares. “She supported me 100 percent. When you dream of something outside the box you really must feel you can do it. We married four years ago and we now have a son, Lorenzo. He’s 18 months old and a bit of a demon. He is not allowed in my studios because he might break it to pieces.’’

Esteban also impressed as the very antithesis of a self-employed artist. “I am very methodical,’’ he explained. “After breakfast with my wife and son I leave home for my studio, which is in another part of the city, and there I work a 10-hour day and return for dinner at our home, which is in Recoleta. If my studio was in our home I could be tempted to return to it at 3 o’clock in the morning to change something I’d painted the day before. But to be truly creative you must also let yourself go and put your work aside until you find your breath again.”

In the opening pages of “Ser Argentino” Esteban expressed his gratitude to individuals and institutions “... thanks to the extraordinary contribution of the photographic archive of El Grafico magazine. Almost 90 years old, El Grafico has always been close to Argentina polo and this edition is full proof of this. We thank the Argentine Polo Association, La Nacion newspaper and Mrs Luisa Miguens de Tanoira for their co-operation in the making of this work.’’ Anyone wanting to view other Esteban artworks should visit his website, diazmathé.com confirming that he is in no way a shrinking violet.

But what prompted him to add polo to the homage he paid to gauchos and their horses? Thanks to “Ser Argentino,” he came to the attention of Marcos Uranga, a former president of the Argentine Polo Association and a founder and first president of the Federation of International Polo now representing 56 national polo associations. Seventy-nine years old with seven children and 21 grandchildren, he is now a sort of elderstatesman of global polo. He contacted Esteban, expressed his admiration for the painter’s equine artworks and urged him turn his talent to celebrating polo.

“Though I’ve loved horses and riding all my life I only played ‘fun’ polo as a kid with a friend whose family owned a horse-stud outside Buenos Aires,’’ Esteban recalls. “But two years ago with Marcos’s encouragement I started watching polo and taking photos at all the important polo clubs like Hurlingham, Tortugas and Palermo. At Marcos’s request I also did polo drawings for the official history of FIP (commemorating its 30th anniversary), and I’ve painted the front-covers of the last four annual editions of the Argentine Polo Pony Breeders’ Association.’’ With Marcos’s support he has now struck up friendships and won the support of such eminent polo families as Pieres, Mac Donough and Novillo-Astrada.

Beyond Argentina, Esteban has drawn and painted the Brazilian landscape, estancias and its polo. Armed with his paints, brushes and cameras, he recently viewed American polo for the first time as a guest of ‘Skey’ Johnson, father to Gillian Johnston, patron of the U.S. highgoal Coca-Cola team based in Wellington, Florida, at Johnson’s own Flying H Polo Club in Big Horn, Wyoming.

Postscript: Henry Ward Beecher (1815-87) was an American evangelical preacher celebrated in his time for the eloquence and moral fervour of his sermons. Now he is recalled only as the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” (published in 1851).

Brother and sister were fervently committed to the abolition of slavery, a conviction they share with Abraham Lincoln who, elected to the presidency, sent Beecher to Europe to explain the President’s cause to the wider world. Beecher features here because he once famously remarked of an artist’s role in society as if he was speaking of Esteban Diaz Mathé: Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.

By Chris Ashton