Joaquim Vayreda i Vila

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Portrait of the painter Joaquim Vayreda i Vila by Antoni Caba 1870

Joaquim Vayreda i Vila (born May 23, 1843 in Girona , † October 31, 1894 in Olot ) was a Catalan landscape painter of realism. He is considered to be the founder of the landscape painting school of Olot . Joaquim Vayreda is the brother of the botanist Estanislaus Vayreda i Vila (1848–1901) and the painter and writer Marià Vayreda i Vila (1853–1903).

Vayreda came from a noble rural family from Olot who had temporarily relocated to Girona because of the First Carlist War. In 1860 he went to Barcelona to study philosophy. There he assisted in the studio of Ramon Martí i Alsina , who definitely advocated a natural representation of the landscape. According to Vayreda, this program was ideally suited for painting his home landscape, the Garrotxa , with its capital Olot. So he returned to Olot in 1868. Here he founded an art center, which he asked Josep Berga i Boix to manage. This center became the nucleus of the Olot School . Until 1871 he painted landscape themes in which traditional religious motifs were integrated. In his demanding work “Tarda de Divendres Sant a Olot” (“Good Friday Afternoon in Olot”, 1871, Museu d'Art Modern d'Olot ) he put his realism of landscape painting at the service of the Catholic religion. This line of tradition ended in 1871 with a trip to Paris, where he became acquainted with the landscape painting of Barbizon . He adapted the impressive sketching technique and the composition technique of large masses of this school, which give the landscape a sensitive character. His work “Recança” (“Regret”, “Suffering”, 1876, Museu d'Art Modern del MNAC, Barcelona ) is an example of this creative period . Fleeing from the political instability caused by the last Carlist War, Vayreda went to southern France from 1873 to 1875. Vayreda's stays in France gave rise to the French landscape painting by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot , Théodore Rousseau and Charles-François Daubigny and an influence of the bucolic traditionalism of Jean-François Millet in Catalan painting. In the pictures of this time, Vayreda addresses the hard, sad, honorable working life of the farmers, who seem to be inseparably interwoven with nature and completely embedded in it, but who never lose their strength in their fatalism.

Joaquim Vayreda i Vila: Primavera (Spring)

The contemporary criticism paints a completely different Vayreda in part. He is branded as an “impressionist” because his sketchy pictures are not fully worked out (for example the work Vora de l'Estany , 1883–1886, lakeside , private collection). What is correct about this criticism is that Vayreda anticipates elements of pre-impressionism, which represent the changing sides of nature. Phenomena such as the formation of flowers in fields, the blossoming of trees, reflections in the water, the light of dusk or the morning dew on the meadows reproduce nature at very specific moments. With his classic themes of landscape painting, Vayreda is on the one hand a traditionalist, on the other hand he leads the way in painting pure landscape to impressionism and modernism .

literature

  • Enciclopèdia Catalana: Vayreda i Vila, Joaquim . In: Gran enciclopèdia catalana. 1st edition. tape 15 . Enciclopèdia catalana, Barcelona 1987, ISBN 84-85194-11-X , p. 304 (Catalan).
  • Hèlios Rubio et al .: Art de Catalunya (Ars Cataloniae) . "L'Escola d'Olot", there also "Joaquim Vayreda i Vila". 1st edition. tape 9 /16 (Pintura moderna i Contemporània). Edicions L'Isard, Barcelona 2001, ISBN 84-89931-19-4 , pp. 200-202 .

Web links

Commons : Joaquim Vayreda  - collection of images, videos and audio files