Arcadi Mas i Fondevila

ARCADI MAS I FONDEVILA (Barcelona, 1852 - Sitges, Barcelona, 1934).
"Children on the Beach".
Oil on panel.
Signed in the lower left corner.
With label on the back of The Columbus Museum.
Size: 28 x 38,5 cm; 42 x 54 cm (frame).
In this painting Mas i Fondevila presents us with a non-stereotyped picture of a corner of the Catalan coast, a landscape that is shown to us with the evocative character of the everyday, the close and the known. A group of children, probably the children of fishermen, frolic in the sand, while others rest beside a boat and climb over its prow. Formally, the careful study of colour and light stands out, the result of which is an image solidly constructed on an agile reading rhythm.
A painter and draughtsman and founder of the luminist school of Sitges, Arcadi Mas i Fondevila trained at the Escuela de La Lonja in Barcelona, where his teachers were Antonio Caba and Claudio Lorenzale. At the age of twenty he took part in his first group exhibition, organised in the hall of the Barcelona Artistic Association. In 1873 he travelled to Madrid, visited the Prado Museum and exhibited a painting in the Platería Martínez room, which was later bought by King Alfonso XII. Two years later he won the first Fortuny scholarship from the Barcelona City Council, which enabled him to further his studies by travelling to Italy on a scholarship between 1876 and 1886. During these years, Arcadi Mas i Fondevila visited Venice, Rome, Naples and Capri, while taking part in several group exhibitions at the Sala Parés in Barcelona. Ascribed to the Neapolitan naturalist school of Domenico Morelli, in 1885 he also took part in the exhibition of the Centre of Watercolourists in Barcelona. On his return to Catalonia, his friend Joan Roig Soler encouraged him to visit Sitges, and from this meeting and acquaintance the Sitges Luminist school was born, a pictorial current that brought together other artists such as Joaquim de Miró, Antoni Almirall and Joan Batlle. In 1887 he took part in the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid, and won a medal for his work "Corpus Christi Procession in Sitges". He also took part in the Universal Exhibition in Barcelona the following year, winning the first medal. In 1895 he travelled to Madrid again, this time accompanied by Santiago Rusiñol and Zuloaga, and later went to Granada with Rusiñol, Miguel Utrillo and Macari Oller, with the intention of illustrating some articles by Rusiñol for "La Vanguardia". Mas i Fondevila won two more medals at the Barcelona Fine Arts Exhibitions of 1894 and 1896, and in 1899 he became a member of the Círculo Artístico de Sant Lluc. In 1900 he opened the Rovira Salon in Barcelona with his first individual exhibition, a show that established him as a master of pastel painting. An example of the importance of this painter can be found in the fact that Picasso had copied a nude of his from 1895. During this period, moreover, Mas i Fondevila collaborated as a draughtsman in "La Ilustració Catalana". Thanks to a donation from the American patron Charles Deering, in 1913 he painted the tympanum of the portal of Santa Catalina in the church of San Bartolomé and Santa Tecla in Sitges. Today a copy can be admired "in situ", the original having been erased by the passage of time. In 1928 he was commissioned to paint one of the murals in the Sala de Sant Jordi in the Palace of the Generalitat in Barcelona, and in 1932 he again exhibited individually, this time in the La Pinacoteca room. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death, the Sitges Study Group devoted an anthological exhibition to him at the Maricel Museum (1985). In his painting, Mas i Fondevila combined Catalan localism with his Neapolitan memories. He also painted portraits, with outstanding works such as those of Antonio Caba and Pitarra. He is represented in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, the Maricel, the Cau Ferrat and Sitges Town Hall, as well as in other museums and private collections.