Pablo Zelaya Sierra was one the earliest Honduran artists to engage in modernist pictorial practices. He was still a teenager when he travelled by foot from his native rural hometown to Tegucigalpa, Managua, and San José, sojourning in each of these Central American capitals in search of exchanges with other artists. In 1920, funding from the Honduran government allowed him to start studies at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, where he studied under Manuel Benedito, a student of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, and also under Daniel Vásquez Díaz. During his years in Europe (1920–32), Zelaya became conversant with modernist pictorial languages, particularly Post-Impressionism, while also an adept draughtsman and painter of academic pictures.