The Museu Carmen Thyssen Andorra proposes this week a new guided visit of the exhibition “INFLUENCERS in art. From Van Goyen to Pop Art”.
Today we invite you to discover “Landscape with flock of sheep” c. 1881 by the artist Joaquín Vayreda. Work that is part of the Carmen Thyssen collection and that you can listen to from home.
Joaquim Vayreda’s father, who knew his son’s skills, enrolled him at a very young age in the Olot Public School of Drawing. Later, Vayreda will continue his training with one of the most important landscape masters in Catalonia: Ramón Martí Alsina.
Joaquim Vayreda’s style will be strongly influenced by Martí Alsina, conducting an anatomical study of the landscape and closely following the characteristics of the Barbizon school.
Later, his work will be influenced by the artistic currents of France, and during his stay in the capital he will know the work of Camille Corot, Millet, Théodore Rousseau and Daubigny, making his painting evolve towards the approach to Impressionism. Vayreda’s artistic interest and fame led him to found the Olot Artistic Center, the nucleus of the so-called Olot School of Painting.
In the work “Landscape with a flock of sheep”, Vayreda performs a vigorous execution that reinforces the spontaneous character of the landscape. His sketchy and suggestive invoice makes up the work with great formal economy, avoiding the detailed description for the benefit of the overall impression.
In the early eighties, the landscapes with flocks of sheep painted by Joaquim Vayreda were a great success with critics and audiences. The bourgeoisie of the first years of the Restoration liked this humanized and positive vision of the rural world and nature, and thus make their work known among the Catalan bourgeoisie of the time, who valued it and began to buy their paintings.
Close to the feelings of the romantic artists, his works convey an intimate lyricism that characterized the poetic realism of Vayreda as one of the most admired features, becoming one of the most prominent Catalan landscape painters of the nineteenth century.
