Tríptico de la Adoración de los Reyes Magos [Triptych of the Adoration of the Magi]
Joos van Cleve
At the end of the fifteenth century, Flemish painter Joachim Patinir laid out clear rules for landscape painting. In this triptych, the tones – from brown to the blue used to show distance – seep through the arches of the ruined stable in Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph are greeting the Magi, who have come to worship the Infant Jesus.
Paisaje con Cristo y los fariseos [Landscape with Christ and the Pharisees]
Pierre Patel (El Viejo)
In the foreground of the painting, a wheatfield beside some ruined buildings is the setting for the biblical story of Christ’s disciples eating ears of grain as the Pharisees rebuke them for breaking the sabbath. Unlike Christ, the Pharisees place greater stock on sacrifice than mercy and love. However, it is the immense verdant landscape that wins any dialectical dispute here; the perspective, stretching across the painting symbolises a path of hope.
Perspectiva con pórtico y jardín [Perspective with Portico and Garden]
Vicente Giner
The Banco de España Collection boasts two paintings by Vicente Giner. In both pictures, the landscape is framed by majestic ruins. These follies are an Italianate touch which reveal something of the artist’s own life story, as does the way the landscape is structured vis-à-vis the city. The emerging vegetation engages and guides our thoughts; in the foreground are the everyday tasks that that occupy our mind and blind us to all else. In the vista beyond we see the vastness… and the abyss.
Paisaje con carretas en un vado [Landscape with Carts at a Ford]
Unknown Artist (Dutch)
This is the first of the pictures in our itinerary in which the landscape is the central feature. It is the landscape that sets the atmosphere and it makes the action in the centre of the picture merely anecdotal. This way of enveloping the subject is a realist device, establishing the primacy of nature and the world over any human ambition. The journey will change the life of the travellers, but, in the style of landscape artist Meindert Hobbema, everything is ordered according to its importance...
Paisaje montañoso [Mountainous Landscape]
George Elgar Hicks
For the Romantics, mountains represented not landscape, but difficulty. George Elgar Hicks is better known for his portraits than his landscapes. Yet this mountain scene, telling the story of a laborious quest amidst the ruins, is a more faithful reflection of the painter’s soul than any depiction of the Victorian middle classes.
Paisaje de Gerona [Gerona Landscape]
Santiago Rusiñol
The painter observes a landscape – more the gentle, damp appearance than the place itself – and sets down his au "plein air" impression, and the force with which he is moved by the greenness. The light sparkles with the threat of a storm. There is no portrait, no narrative here. Rusiñol centres on his impressions, immerses himself in the macroworld of nature and offers us a hint of the abstraction that was already beginning to blur Paris landscapes.
Paisaje (Camí antic de Vilanova) [Landscape (Old Vilanova Road)]
Ramón Casas i Carbó
This is the portrait of a transformation and it is intended to be accurate, not amicable. Here the past, made of dust, and the future, built from iron and effort, meet without ever intersecting, in the same naturalistic landscape. We see what is absent: the train and the carts. There is nature, dust and a hill sliced through to make way for progress. Ramón Casas painted what he saw and in the –often lonely– middle-class life of the city, he found more doubt than joy.
Paisaje con árboles [Landscape with Trees]
Julio González
This watercolour is an experiment. The picture centres on the tree trunk, drawing our eye towards a detail in the landscape and accompanying the artist on his search. There is a hint here of González’s later move into sculpture. The sketch is built up gradually, with charcoal and almost sap-like watercolours, taking a leap from two to three dimensions in his quest for an ever-elusive freedom.
París [Paris]
Alfonso de Olivares
This urban landscape, with its cosmopolitan scene is fast-moving, expressive and emphatic. It tells us less about the artist than about his carefree, celebratory way of discovering the world. De Olivares was a diplomat and collector who joined his friends – fellow adoptee Parisians – in becoming a painter. His brush strokes encapsulate what he sees, describing the modern spirit of the age more than any specific place.
Nubes sobre Castilla [Clouds over Castile]
Joaquín Vaquero Palacios
This landscape is somewhat overwhelming; it might be a fragment or a whole. It feels as if we could reach out and touch it and yet it is constructed entirely of colour. Vaquero Palacios was an architect, who worked on large-scale projects and this sense of grandeur is also evident in his painting. In this painting we see Castille, but also Rome, where he lived for fifteen years. The horizontal lines create a boundless, infinite horizon.
Sevilla [Seville]
Carmen Laffón
The city is viewed from the shelter of a house. In this landscape, Seville takes on the hue of the jasmine in the flowerpots, rather than the colour of the streets as one walks along them. In Laffón’s oeuvre, still lifes and portraits are just as important as places. This painting brings it all together; the city is silenced and blurred by distance, cocooned by light and tamed by the perspective from which it is painted.
Escena con barcos [Scene with Boats]
Pancho Cossío
This picture might almost be painted with sand rather than gouache. One has to strain to make out the boats, whose keels are just two brush strokes broken by the surroundings (supposedly maritime but depicted in a brownish grey). Towards the end of his career, Cossío used the same methods as seventeenth-century painters to grind and bake his earth pigments, burying his work beneath the sandstone rocks.
Olivos y encinas [Olive and Holm Oak Trees]
Godofredo Ortega Muñoz
The striking austerity of the much drier landscape is the opposite of resignation; it is a paean to essence. Ortega Muñoz is a master of the succinct. He portrays the noble sobriety of nature, making the most of what it has and where little flourishes. Order, calm, silence, tranquillity and, yet, the ordinary life of a place, all depicting a way of life.
Poniente (Paisaje) [Looking West (Landscape)]
Benjamín Palencia
This is a landscape by an artist who is reinventing himself, an artist who felt his way and took risks with surrealism and now seeks calm without abandoning his feelings of astonishment. The picture reflects Palencia’s rediscovery both of a place – Castille – and of himself, in the closing years of his life.
Paisaje [Landscape]
Juan Manuel Díaz Caneja
The Castilian countryside is straw-yellow, undefined, abstract, and, at times, very geometric. Díaz-Caneja’s landscapes appear realistic in tone and imaginative in form. Here, the old notion of Castilian austerity is shown replete with possibility. This landscape might almost be an aerial view, or a stone wall. It was painted towards the end of the artist’s life. Like Federico Garcia Lorca, Díaz-Caneja was interested in the Spanish landscape; in it he saw horizon and future.
Mar groc [Yellow Sea]
Albert Ràfols-Casamada
This landscape is a colour. It is painted so sparingly, the oils so thin, that it might almost be a watercolour. One might interpret it as an abstract colour field. And indeed, that is what it is. Yet we also know that what we are seeing is not a sandy beach, but the sea, because the painter tells us so. That is one of the features of modernism: what is important is not what we see, but what we are told or what we intuit. In his diary, Ràfols-Casamada wrote that colour speaks when the subject is silent...
Participando en la naturaleza [Participating in Nature]
Manuel Hernández Mompó
Hernández Mompó uses the white light of the Spanish Levante and little else to depict nature. The world is effaced by what truly matters. Faded people and things, turned into outlines by the blinding gaze of beauty. Strokes that are signs and the canvas turned into landscape, opening up the boundaries of a place. And of the self. Becoming nature. An expansive gaze for a spiritual result that obsessed the matterist painters, making this painting a form of testament.
Tres fustes [Three Pieces of Wood]
Perejaume
The paintings consists of three unpatterned pieces of wood. Here it is the material that speaks. The landscape is not imaginary; it is a micro-landscape encapsulated in the wood. It is built out of the juxtaposition of the grain. Unlike the previous painting, we do not see the landscape because the artist tells us it is there. Taking things one stage further, Perejaume explicitly reveals the nature of the game: these are three overlapping pieces of wood. And yet we see a landscape...
Tierz (Huesca)
José Beulas
We go from observing nature to reinventing it. Beulas’s work is defined by the silence of the landscape of Huesca. It sharpens his gaze and conveys his evolution. Beulas was born in the leafy surroundings of Girona, but he summons us to explore austerity, a message that would eventually lead him to go and live among the places he painted. He needed to inhabit his own landscapes. The pieces in the Banco de España Collection reflects this journey of reduction, ending almost in abstraction...
Quelques herbes
Miquel Barceló
Barceló is the leading Spanish painter of the 2º half of the twentieth century. He paints energy, making his paint out of anything he has to hand – earth, seeds, air. His art is palpable, sensual, ‘brut’ and informal, Barceló builds narratives through accumulation, concealing or depicting the big story by focusing on the small. We see the world in a leaf, a shipwreck, the sap from a stem or a cookpot. We see him and, above all, we see the matterist construction, the metamorphosis that any painting entails.
Turia
Carmen Calvo
This is a landscape painted from memory, the river of the artist’s home city reproduced from the physical distance. The colour is that of memory, of malleable clay. The artist might be said to be doing the same with her scenes as she does with the archaeology of materials with which she builds her paintings. The river is rope and earth, the bridges are dry stems. This collage anticipates pop, but it is more realistic than it initially appears; in it we see the bed of the Tulia river, turned to dry...
Paisaje [Landscape]
Carmen Pinart
Where Ràfols-Casamada’s sea was yellow, Carmen Pinart’s is golden. And again, we need to take her word for it to see it. Pinart – a figurative and organic artist – turns to the still life, closes in on the gold leaf of history, nature and oriental art, and dazzles us. Pinart, the artist who can paint the crunch of an onion skin, offers us a landscape that both blinds and escapes us.
Sin título. Huella 12 [Untitled. Footprint 12]
Montserrat Soto
Here we see a contemporary ruin that is being consumed by nature and by the passing of time. It might be viewed as a protest, but there is no sense of revenge; just natural logic and observation. The architecture has given way to what was there before. The vegetation and the empty building stand together.