This week, the Museu Carmen Thyssen Andorra offers you a new guided tour of a particular work from the exhibition “INFLUENCERS in art. From Van Goyen to Pop Art”, which you can listen to from home.
Today, the Museu Carmen Thyssen Andorra invites you to discover “Portrait of a Girl”, by the artist Antoni Caba i Casamitjana, which is part of the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection.
The painter and decorator Antoni Caba, was a professor and director of the Escola de la Llotja in Barcelona, becoming a great master for the new generations of painters such as Rusiñol, Miró i Lleó or Graner i Arrufí.
He studied with Gabriel Planella, Pau Milà Fontanals and Claudio Lorenzale at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts, and extended his studies in Madrid thanks to a pension granted to him by the Diputació de la Ciutat de Barcelona in 1863. There he was a student of the great master Federico de Madrazo.
After his stage in the French capital, under the teachings of the fresco artist Carlos Ruiz Delaroche, he approached the brilliant brushstroke of Franz Hals and later gave more prominence to the line, with which he transcends the canvas.
He decorated the Gran Teatre del Liceu and some Catalan private residences, specializing in history and realistic painting. Yielding to the taste of the thriving bourgeois clientele, Caba found in the genre of portraiture, the ideal terrain in which to deploy his research on the effects of real light and chiaroscuro, bequeathing an abundant portrait production that shows his stylistic eclecticism and his pictorial concerns.
In his works he opts for atmospheres illuminated by a dim workshop light, which is reflected in the faces of his portraits, achieving a clean outline painting and reaching a very hight photographic realism.
