Gustave Charles Bacarisas was born in Gibraltar on 23 September 1872. The eldest of three brothers, his parents being Gabriel Bacarisas and Adela Podesta; the family was then living in Castle Street. He was educated at the Christian Brothers College in Line Wall Road, and already as a young boy had impressed everybody by one of his paintings of a warrior on horseback.

One of the very first paintings that exist of the artist is a portrait of his brother Francisco painted in 1890. In 1892, at the age of 19, a group of Gibraltarian businessmen, at the initiative of a John Imossi, realizing his artistic potential, granted him a scholarship to study art in Rome. His earliest pencil drawings Male Head, Female Nude and Male Nu...