Nicolau Raurich: Barcelona 1871 - 1945

Nicolau Raurich was one of the most personal and different Spanish landscape painters of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, and a key representative of post-Impressionism. After leaving the family business, he focused on his artistic training at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Barcelona (School of Fine Arts in Barcelona) and afterwards as a disciple of Eliseu Meifrén (1857–1940). Encouraged by his successes garnered in 1892, he participated in the Exposición del IV Centenario del Descubrimiento de Puerto Rico (Exhibition of the Fourth Centenary of the Discovery of Puerto Rico) in San Juan with two works that served to consolidate him on the international art scene.

At the end of 1894 he settled in Rome and formed part of the colony of Spanish painters. There he specialised in portraying the Pontine Marshes, following the painting of Enric Serra (1859-1918) and the romantic aesthetic that connected with Central European painting. Precisely these types of works, such as Pantanos de Nemi (Nemi marshes) (1896), Ruinas de Ninfa (Ruins of Ninfa) (1896) and Fangal (Quagmire) (1897), resulted in the definitive consecration of the painter in the official competitions. Having received awards and achieved recognition, he returned to Barcelona for good in March 1898 and focused on portraying Catalan landscapes. At this time, his style was transformed, and he abandoned the neo-Romantic approach to luminism with new pictorial formulas. Thus, from 1899, with Costas de Pineda (Coast of Pineda), thick impastos, relief, and aggressive colors were incorporated into his works as main features. Interest in the values of pictorial matter became the artist’s obsession, traits that never left his production. The expressiveness of Raurich’s landscapes were the main attraction of this new artistic period for him, in which Pyrenean visions, views of Sant Pol de Mar and high-intensity nocturnal scenes were recurring themes and those that worked best on the Catalan art market.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Urgell won his main awards and medals (Madrid, Paris, Athens, and Barcelona) and remained faithful to his personal style which was a renewal of post-Impressionist painting in Spain. From 1936 he remained reclused in his studio house painting, removed from the local and international artistic circuit. His work became decadent and sometimes obscure. The material that had been so well constructed in previous years became diluted, thus losing all personality. He died in June 1945, isolated, ill, and locked in his room.