Luis Alvarez Catalá Madrid 1836-1901

Luis Alvarez Catalá was among the most distinguished members of the Spanish school in Rome. After studying at the San Fernando School in Madrid he won a scholarship to the Italian capital, where he attended the Chigi Academy and became a close friend of Mariano Fortuny (see lots 152 and 180). Alvarez quickly established himself as the painter par excellence of conversation pieces set in eighteenth-century interiors, which found a ready market both in Italy and in Spain.

The eighteenth century assumed an almost mythic significance for bourgeois Europe of a hundred years later. It was the age of elegance, a commodity which many people felt to be lacking contemporarily. The new rich in particular looked back with admiration and even nostalgia to a society in which the aristocrat held sway. Emulation of aristocratic taste, and acquisition of social respectability were at the root of their taste for paintings of elegant people in luxurious surroundings.