Segundo Matilla

SEGUNDO MATILLA MARINA (Madrid, 1862 - Teià, Barcelona, 1937).
"Marina".
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Presents restoration on the canvas.
Measurements: 59 x 98 cm; 87 x 127 cm (frame).

In this work Segundo Matilla offers us a melancholic and evocative marine, a sample of the lyricism of the everyday, of the poetry hidden behind the known and close landscape. He develops a composition of great simplicity, based on the horizontal plane of the earth, which delimits the two halves of the painting, different in amplitude. In fact, behind the narrow and bright strip of the sea rises a wide sky worked with exquisite sensitivity based on very slight tonal variations and points of light, reflecting with naturalism and poetry the imposing beauty of the dawn sky, its double quality, cold in the atmosphere and warm in the light, perfectly harmonious.

Although he was born in Madrid, Matilla trained and developed his career in Barcelona. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, under the direction of Antonio Caba. An outstanding representative of Spanish impressionism, he participated in numerous exhibitions and official competitions held in Barcelona, such as the group exhibitions organized by the Círculo Artístico (1895), the International Exhibitions of 1891, 1894, 1896 and 1898 (honorable mention in 1891) or the Art Exhibitions of 1918 and 1919. In 1897 he obtained an honorable mention at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid for his painting "Washerwomen of Galicia". He also showed his work in Paris, taking part in exhibitions such as the French Artists' Salon of 1897. Among his individual exhibitions, those held at the Salón Vilches in Madrid and, in Barcelona, at the Sala Parés (from 1907) and the Pallarés Galleries (1942), the latter a posthumous tribute, stand out. Several of his works exhibited there were bought by the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid, and many others were exported to America. Of special success was his very large exhibition (one hundred and fifty works) held at the Sala Parés in 1914, received with unanimous praise from the critics of the time. The following year it was presented in Madrid at the Salón Vilches, where all the works exhibited were sold. He achieved great public and critical success thanks to his landscapes of the Ampurdán, Camprodón, Port de la Selva and Cadaqués. A painter endowed with astonishing skill, with a marked personality full of sensitivity, a mastery of drawing and painting technique and an overflowing capacity for work, Segundo Matilla was an excellent painter who cultivated absolutely all genres, being a great landscape painter and sailor, painting portraits of great quality, especially of people from the world of show business, and his flower paintings and still lifes were also highly appreciated. His paintings of bullfighting themes, painted with great spontaneity and full of movement, demonstrate his great fondness for the art of Cúchares. Within the landscape genre, Matilla showed a predilection for the evening hours, in the manner of Eliseo Meifrèn. He always painted in a totally intelligible way and without any kind of reflexive complications, ignoring absolutely all the artistic trends of his time. Segundo Matilla was also the teacher of outstanding painters of the following generation, among them his nephew, Joaquim Terruella, and Antoni Rosell Altamira. His work is currently exhibited in various museums, such as the aforementioned Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, the Prado Museum (works on deposit at the Economic Court of the Central Administration and the Municipal Museum of Malaga), the Pablo Gargallo Museum in Zaragoza and the National Art Museum of Catalonia, as well as in important international private collections.