Jose de Creeft years of age, de Creeft took his first job earning pennies by carrying stone and sand at the construction site of "La Sagrada Familia", designed and built by the architect Antonio Gaudi. In 1895, de Creeft began modeling religious figures in clay to sell at the Festival Santa Lucia, Barcelona, which he fired at home in his kiln and sold near the steps of the Cathedral of Barcelona. Two years later he began his first apprenticeship with the craftsman and imagier, Barnadas who carved religious figures in wood. A year later, he was apprenticed at the Artistic Foundry of Masriera
Sagrada Família stability. Describing Sagrada Família, art critic Rainer Zerbst said "it is probably impossible to find a church building anything like it in the entire history of art", and Paul Goldberger describes it as "the most extraordinary personal interpretation of Gothic architecture since the Middle Ages". The Basilica of the Sagrada Família was the inspiration of a bookseller, Josep Maria Bocabella, founder of Asociación Espiritual de Devotos de San José (Spiritual Association of Devotees of St. Joseph). After a visit to the Vatican in 1872, Bocabella returned from Italy with the intention of building a church inspired by the basilica at