MODEST URGELL INGLADA (Barcelona, 1839 - 1919).
"Rural Landscape with a Figure.
Oil on panel.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Size: 20 x 38 cm; 49 x 66 cm (frame).
The defining attributes that marked Modest Urgell's artistic personality coincide in this painting: a rural setting in a solitary spot, a sublime and romantic palette with which the Barcelona master immortalised the magic of the twilight hour, and the marked horizontality that defined his production.
Modest Urgell began his career as a theatrical actor, but his family's prohibition against pursuing that path led him to devote himself to painting. He studied at the Escuela de La Lonja in Barcelona, where he was a disciple of Ramón Martí Alsina, and later spent some time in Paris, where he came into contact with Gustave Courbet and became a follower of realism. During the 1960s his works were rejected at the official exhibitions in Madrid and Barcelona. In 1870 he moved to Olot, where he became acquainted with Joaquín Vayreda, the creator of the local landscape school. From then on Urgell decided to devote himself fully to landscape painting. His work focused on solitary natures and seascapes, often featuring hermitages and cemeteries, marked by a twilight, desolate and mysterious atmosphere. From 1896 he taught landscape painting at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, and was appointed an academician in 1902. He was also the founder of the Artistic and Literary Society of Catalonia and of the Artistic and Archaeological Museum of Girona. He took part in all the editions of the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid from 1864 until the year before his death, and was awarded the second medal in 1876 and 1892. He also sent his paintings to the Barcelona exhibitions, as well as to the Universal Exhibition in Paris and the international exhibitions in Munich, Brussels, Berlin, Philadelphia and Chicago. In 1892 he was awarded prizes in all the competitions in which he took part, including the Brussels competition, in which he was the only Spaniard to win a prize. He also devoted himself to literature, with a special interest in the theatre. The sum of his two passions, art and literature, are expressed in his album "Catalunya" (1905), made up of more than a hundred drawings accompanied by texts written by himself. His landscapes have an atmosphere, colour and themes that deny the stereotype of the Mediterranean landscape, based on warm and friendly natures, with brilliant chromaticism, like windows open to southern sensuality. His paintings, on the contrary, speak of melancholy and solitude, and time and again recreate a desolate and sad Catalonia to which, years later, the poet Salvador Espriu would also be sensitive. His language rejects any fanciful or picturesque subject matter, taking up ordinary subjects without attempting to ennoble or idealise them, but rather seeking to provoke states of mind in the viewer through twilight that dissolves, for brief moments, in a harmony of reds, or his desolate cemeteries and severe, bare, stripped seascapes. Urgell is represented in the Prado Museum, the National Art Museum of Catalonia, the Maritime Museum of Barcelona, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Víctor Balaguer Museum in Vilanova i la Geltrú, the Caixa Sabadell and Caixa d'Estalvis de Terrassa Art Funds, the Dalí Museum in Figueras and the Provincial Museums of Gerona, Palma de Mallorca and Lugo, among many other centres and institutions.