19th century Spanish school

Spanish school of the 19th century.
"Landscape with hermitage at sunset".
Oil on panel.
Signed "J. Márquez" in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 18 x 32 cm; 31 x 45 cm (frame).

The one we see here is a landscape with hermitage of great evocative power, melancholic and twilight, in the line of the Catalan painter Modest Urgell (1839-1919) and his followers. This outstanding landscape painter born in Barcelona always preferred sunsets and desolate landscapes, which places his work halfway between romantic and impressionist landscape painting. In this painting the author shares these concerns with Urgell; the view is organized in two planes, markedly horizontal, with the sky occupying as much space as the earth. Also in Urgell's work these resources are frequent, this marked horizontality and the tendency to symmetry of the composition, effects that reinforce the monumental dimension of nature as opposed to the smallness and insignificance of man.