Important Christmas Fine Art Auction: Haute Epoque, Jewels and Colonial Treasures
Lot 291:
Oil on canvas. Oil measurements: 33 x 22 cm. Provenance: old family collection, Barcelona. Isidre Nonell Monturiol (Barcelona, November 30, 1872-Barcelona, February 21, 1911) Spanish painter and draftsman, belonging to modernism. Born in Barcelona on November 30, 1872, he belonged to a relatively wealthy family. He trained in various academies, including that of Luis Graner, 1889. He was part of the group Els Quatre Gats, with Picasso, Rusiñol and others. He lived outside bourgeois society, which he criticized in his paintings. Around 1891 he formed a small group of landscapers, cultivating this genre in small format. In 1893 he studied at the Escuela de la Lonja in Barcelona and held his first exhibition. In 1894 he began to draw small paintings of Cretinos, especially when he went, two years later, with Ricard Canals to Caldas de Bohí. He dedicated this time in Caldas to painting landscapes and cretins. In February 1897 he went to Paris with Canals. There he exhibited, shared a studio with Picasso and made his paintings about the lower social classes. He returned to Barcelona in 1900. From 1901 he made paintings of female figures, such as gypsies, and still lifes. He had a relationship with the gypsy model Consuelo, who became his muse. After Consuelo’s early death, Nonell continued painting some gypsy women. Marked by impressionism, he is assigned to modernism. He has also been considered in a certain way a continuator of the vision of the so-called black Spain with Regoyos and Solana. From that chapter are his portraits of cretins and gypsies, showing the lowest classes of society in their misery and pain. Reference bibliography: Escala i Romeu, Glòria (2015). «The influence of Isidre Nonell on the young Picasso». Locus Amoenus 13:169-185. ISSN 2014-8798.
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