Code: 10126
Dimensions:
MARIANO FORTUNY Reus, near Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain 1838 - 1874 Rome
A Young Woman Holding Flowers by a Wall.
Watercolor. Signed by the artist lower right.
Mariano Fortuny is arguably the greatest Spanish artist of the 19th century. He began his training in earnest in Barcelona in 1852 where his first master was the painter Claudio Lorenzale y Sugrañes. Fortuny soon abandoned his master's influence and moved away from the linear purity of the German Nazarenes in favor of a broader and more immediate approach, inspired by Fortuny's interest in the lithographs of Paul Gavarni.
Fortuny soon developed a superb color sense which was enhanced by his interest in Orientalist subject matter. This interest imbued his paintings and watercolors from the 1860s onwards with a superb integration of pictorial detail and color. Our drawings both show his supple approach to watercolor. Fortuny often overlaid areas of dense, saturated color and juxtaposed them with more thinly applied color. The result is a rich, almost tapestry-like screen of color. The woman's left sleeve and her apron are shadowed in tones of blue-gray which fall down her shoulders in a chromatic series of touches of black, blue, blue-gray and red. The intense color of the figure is set off by the muted tones of the wall behind her, in blue, blue-gray and brown.
Fortuny also developed a strikingly modern compositional sensibility. The young woman’s face is indicated only by a delicate series of contours and touches of color; this adds an element of understated mystery and stillness which is enhanced by the rectilinear design of the bench and the vertical fall of her back. The sentiment inherent in the subject is downplayed by the visual richness of the chromatic arrangement of color.
501 x 313 mm 19 ¾ x 12 5/16 inches
