Joaquin Mir

JOAQUÍN MIR TRINXET (Barcelona, 1873 - 1940).
"Masia de C'an Roig, Gualda", 1939.
Oil on canvas.
Attached certificate signed by Don Josep M. Mir i Estalella, son of the artist.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 39 x 46 cm; 54 x 61 cm (frame).
This painting belongs to a late phase of Mir's career, in which the artist, already consolidated, reworks the principles that had defined his singular approach to landscape. Far from the more radical and almost abstract luminism of his Mallorcan period, Mir develops here a more contained language, although equally intense, where nature and rural architecture are integrated in a deeply subjective vision. The scene represents a Catalan farmhouse set in a rugged environment, with a sloping path, barely sketched human figures and dense vegetation that envelops the composition. However, the interest of the work does not lie in the faithful description of the place, but in the way in which the painter constructs the space through a loose, doughy and vibrant brushstroke, which fragments the forms and dissolves the contours. Color, applied with freedom, acquires expressive autonomy: dark greens, ochers and whites not only shape the landscape, but also transmit an almost emotional atmosphere, marked by hallmarks of light contrasts and chromatic tensions. In this sense, the work evidences the continuity of Mir's ideology, linked to a conception of landscape as a sensory experience rather than as an objective representation. However, the context of 1939, the year of the end of the Spanish Civil War, introduces a possible more introspective reading.
Joaquín Mir was trained at the San Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona and in the studio of Luis Graner, and was also influenced by the Olot School. He soon rejected traditional academic teaching and, in 1893, together with other artists, founded the Colla del Safrà, a group that sought a more luminous and Mediterranean style of painting, with a predominance of ochre tones and work in the open air. At the end of the 1890s he joined the modernist environment of Els Quatre Gats, where he came into contact with the European avant-garde and developed his first outstanding works. Mir is today considered the most outstanding representative of Spanish post-impressionist landscape painting. His work is preserved in the National Art Museum of Catalonia, the Prado Museum, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, among many others.