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PROPERTY FROM A EUROPEAN PRIVATE COLLECTION

L'ABIA (THE GRANDMOTHER)

L'ABIA (THE GRANDMOTHER)

118 by 148cm., 46½ by 58¼in.

signed S. Rusiñol l.l.

oil on canvas

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Josep de C. Laplana and Mercedes Palau-Ribes O'Callaghan.

EXHIBITED

San Feliu de Guíxols, Exposició de Belles Arts, Ajuntament de Sant Feliu de Guíxols, 1892, as La Vieja
Sitges, Exposició de Belles Artes de Sitges, Ajuntament, 1892, as La abuela
Madrid, Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1892, no. 1127, as Una vieja
Chicago, World's Columbian Exposition, 1893, no. 139, as Old Woman
Barcelona, Sala Parés, Exposición Santiago Rusiñol, 1893

LITERATURE

Raimon Casellas, La Vanguardia, 27 August 1892
El Eco de Sitges, 28 August 1892
Alfonso Pérez Nieva, La Dinastiá, 19 November 1892
Federico Balarte, El Imperial, 6 December 1892
La Renaixença, 18 October 1894, p. 6126
Josep Maris Jorda, La Publicitat, 19 October 1894, p. 2
R. Casellas, La Vanguardia, 21 October 1894.
Francesc Miquel i Badia, Diario de Barcelona, 23 October 1894, p. 12161
Ignasi Bo i Singla, La Voz de Sitges, 21 October 1894, p. 2
Joaquim Cabot i Rovira, La Veu de Catalunya, IV, 28 October 1894, p. 494
Dibujos i Apuntes, La Vanguardia (c 1895)
Isabel Coll, S. Rusiñol, Sabadell 1990, p. 53
Josep de C. Laplana, Santiago Rusiñol, Barcelona, 1995, p. 219, no. 7.1, illustrated with a drawing

NOTE

Painted in 1892, the whereabouts of this long-lost work has only recently come to light. A seminal painting from Rusiñol's years in Sitges, when he devoted himself to recording characters and events in the local community.

The charismatic leader of Catalan Modernism, and a founder of Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona, Rusiñol became a leading member of the Catalan avant garde. He travelled to Paris in 1889 with Miguel Utrillo and other artists, where he shared rooms in the Moulin de Galette with his close friend and fellow artist Ramón Casas. The pictures of Paris that they exhibited in Barcelona in 1890 and 1891 opened Catalan art to ideas being pioneered in France which found resonance in the atmosphere of cultural renewal in Cataluña.

It was in Paris that Rusiñol came into contact with Edgar Degas and James Abbot McNeil Whistler, whose work had a particular influence on his own. Not only in subject but in the handling of space and the use of grey tonalities, L'Abia owes a particular debt to Whistler's Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother, of 1871. These stark and direct canvases are in marked contrast to Rusiñol's later Mallorcan landscapes (lot 159), in which figures rarely feature.