At the end of 1899, Joaquim Mir travelled to Majorca, where he would remain until he suffered an accident in 1904. While there, he came into contact with William Degouve de Nuncques (1867–1935) and, later, Santiago Rusiñol (1861–1931), with whom he collaborated on the ambitious project of the decoration of the Palma Gran Hotel. However, his principal objective was to find a new pictorial language and much more personal lines of expression. Mir’s main driving force during this period can be translated into these words: “I have many things inside me. That they will out, I swear it; but I do not see them clearly and this causes me to despair”. The wild nature of the north of Majorca became his principal ally in giving free reign to this explosive feeling, prompting him to adopt new methods of pictorial expression, so personal and charged with force and energy.

During his stay on the island, Mir sought out natural spaces and landscapes where human presence was nonexistent. The relief of the terrain, the rugged rocks, the almost inaccessible mountains and coves, definitively, nature in its purest and most hostile form, would be the starting points for his new paintings. These natural references invaded Mir’s landscapes, especially between 1902 and 1904, and his technique evolved rapidly towards a freer brushwork, longer, spontaneous, energetic, and charged with expressivity.

Cave in Mallorca is a work painted in 1903. It is one of the most outstanding canvases of the series that Mir dedicated to the Pareis torrent, near the Sa Calobra cove, in the north of Majorca. This canvas forms part of a group of pieces that mark one of the principle creative moments of Mir’s career: his search for his own language based on nature, which he could use to provoke emotion through light and colour. The unusual forms of rocks eroded by water and wind generate a magic composition with striking colours that are almost phosphorescent, therefore close to approaches linked to fauve painting and to abstraction.