Modest Urgell Inglada

MODEST URGELL INGLADA (Barcelona, 1839–1919).
"Landscape."
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 86 x 44 cm; 106 x 66 cm (frame).
This painting depicts a deeply evocative, melancholic, and somber landscape—an example of the work of an artist who always preferred sunsets and desolate landscapes, whose oeuvre lies halfway between Romantic and Impressionist landscape painting. In this painting, Urgell organizes the scene into two parts using the moonlight, which not only illuminates the sky but also reflects on the river. Amid the shadows of the trees, a modest house stands out, contrasting with the silhouette of the city, where the church tower is prominently featured.
Modest Urgell began his career as a stage actor, but his family’s refusal to allow him to pursue that path led him to devote himself to painting. He studied at the Escuela de La Lonja in Barcelona, where he was a student of Ramón Martí Alsina, and later spent some time in Paris, where he met Gustave Courbet and embraced Realism. During the 1860s, his works were rejected from official exhibitions in Madrid and Barcelona. In 1870, he moved to Olot, where he became friends with Joaquín Vayreda, the founder of the local landscape school. From then on, Urgell decided to devote himself entirely to landscape painting. His work focused on solitary still lifes and seascapes, often featuring hermitages and cemeteries, set against a twilight atmosphere that was desolate and mysterious. Beginning in 1896, he taught landscape painting at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona and was named a member of the Academy in 1902. He was also a founder of the Artistic and Literary Society of Catalonia, as well as the Artistic and Archaeological Museum of Girona. He participated in every edition of the National Fine Arts Exhibition in Madrid from 1864 until the year before his death, and was awarded second prize in 1876 and 1892. He also submitted his paintings to exhibitions in Barcelona, as well as to the World’s Fair in Paris and the International Exhibitions in Munich, Brussels, Berlin, Philadelphia, and Chicago. In 1892, he won awards in every competition in which he participated, including the one in Brussels, where he was the only Spaniard to receive an award. He also devoted himself to literature, with a special interest in theater. The combination of his two passions—art and literature—is reflected in his album *Catalunya* (1905), which consists of more than one hundred drawings accompanied by texts he wrote himself. His landscapes possess an atmosphere, a color palette, and themes that defy the stereotype of the Mediterranean landscape—one based on warm, gentle scenes with brilliant colors, like windows open to southern sensuality. His paintings, by contrast, speak of melancholy and solitude, and time and again they depict a desolate and sad Catalonia to which, years later, the poet Salvador Espriu would also be attuned. His artistic language rejects any fantastical or picturesque themes, capturing everyday subjects without seeking to ennoble or idealize them, but rather aiming to evoke moods in the viewer through twilight lights that dissolve, for brief moments, in a harmony of reds, or through his desolate cemeteries and austere seascapes, bare and stripped of all adornment. 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 art collections of Caixa Sabadell and Caixa d’Estalvis in Terrassa, the Dalí Museum in Figueras, and the provincial museums of Girona, Palma de Mallorca, and Lugo, among many other centers and institutions.