Eliseo Meifrén

ELISEO MEIFREN ROIG (Barcelona, 1859 - 1940).
"Garden Casa Palma".
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner, titled on the back.
Measurements: 58 x 66 cm; 78 x 85 cm (frame).

In this work, Meifrén captures a garden of wild appearance, where the nature grows free and spontaneous. In the foreground, on a pedestal or whitewashed pillar, rests a blue vase resplendent with its bouquet of flowers, standing as the center of visual attraction amidst the greenery. To one side, a tree devoid of flowers (or barely hinting at its first buds) rises with a restrained air. Behind it, the distant outline of some houses can be seen, and beyond, the immensity of the Mediterranean, which opens to the horizon as a luminous background of the composition. The scene combines the intimacy of the domestic with the vastness of the landscape, in a balance of the near and the far, the cultivated and the natural.

A disciple of Antonio Caba at the La Lonja School in Barcelona, after finishing his studies he spent some time in Paris, where he coincided with the public beginning of impressionism and became acquainted with painting "à plen air". He returned to Barcelona in 1879 and, that same year, he won the gold medal at the Regional Exhibition of Valencia. The following year he made his individual debut at the Sala Parés in Barcelona, where he continued to exhibit regularly from then on. He was part of the modernist group, and frequented Els Quatre Gats. Although he also dedicated himself to portraiture, Meifrèn was eminently a landscape and marine painter. He was one of the discoverers of the pictorial possibilities of Cadaqués, and he also used to paint Mallorcan landscapes (he was director of the School of Fine Arts in Palma). He made several trips in search of new landscapes, mainly to France but also to the Canary Islands, Belgium, Italy and the United States. He held exhibitions in Barcelona, Madrid (1881), Chicago (1893), Paris (1899), Brussels (1910), Santiago de Chile (1910), Buenos Aires (1910), Amsterdam (1912) and San Francisco (1915), among many other cities around the world. His style began with the detailed realism that dominated the Catalan school at the end of the 19th century, and gradually evolved towards impressionism, a language that would not be fully evident in his work until his later years. Throughout his career Eliseo Meifrèn won a multitude of prizes, including the first medals at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid (1906) and Barcelona (1896), the Nonell prize in Barcelona (1935), the bronze medal at the Universal Exhibition in Paris (1888) and the grand prizes at the International Exhibitions of Buenos Aires (1910) and San Diego (1916). In 1952, the Barcelona City Council dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him, held at the Palacio de la Virreina. He is currently represented in the Museo del Prado, the Museo Nacional de Arte de Cataluña, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona and the Thyssen-Bornemisza, among many others.