Born in Cataño, Puerto Rico in 1922, painter, draughtsman and sculptor Julio Rosado del Valle is considered one of the great Puerto Rican masters of the second half of the twentieth century.

He trained initially in Puerto Rico under the Spanish painter Cristóbal Ruiz and after moving to New York in 1946 continued his studies at the New School for Social Research under Mario Carreño and Camilo Egas. From 1947 to 1949 he studied in Florence and travelled extensively throughout Europe, and on his return to Puerto Rico in 1949 he joined the Division of Community Education as an illustrator and poster designer. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957 and served as artist-in-residence at the University of Puerto Rico from 1954 to 1982. He presently divides his time working in Spain and in Puerto Rico.

One of the pioneers of abstraction on the island, he has sought to coalesce expressionism and surrealism with directness and imagination.  He has appropriated expressionism's lexicon of erratic, often turbulent brushwork, but has freed these textures and lines from their traditional significance of torment and angst, evoking that innocence of vision the surrealists had hoped to achieve through dream-like imagery.

His work, shown throughout  Europe, North, Central and South America, is on permanent exhibit at the Caixa de Barcelona, Spain, and forms part of the permanent collections of the Pan American Union, OAS, Washington D.C., the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, the Museo de Arte de Ponce and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in San Juan.