ISIDRO NONELL | Consuelo

Private Collection, Barcelona

Purchased by the father of the present owners in the 1970s

'Nuestros grabados', in La Ilustración Artística, Barcelona, 1903, p. 184, illustrated

Enric Jardí, Nonell,' Barcelona, 1969, p. 281, fig. 195, illustrated, p. 316, no. 195, catalogued & illustrated (erroneously catalogue as oil on canvas)

Santos Torroella, 'Nuevamente Nonell', in El Noticiero Universal, Barcelona, 1969, illustrated

Painted in 1902 at the time of his ground-breaking exhibition in Sala Parés, this vibrant work pre-dates Nonell’s darker, more taciturn images of gitanas for which he became best known. The sitter is Nonell’s favourite model, herself of gypsy descent: Consuelo (fig. 1). According to Nonell’s first biographer, Alexandre Plana, Nonell and Consuelo shared a romantic relationship, and certainly the tender portrayal in the present work implies a degree of intimacy. As ever with Nonell, the relationship he presents between himself, his subject, and the viewer is enigmatic. Her gaze turned down, her natural beauty is nevertheless evident in the rich abundance of her hair and the profile of her face.

This work, importantly, shows the closeness of Nonell's work to Picasso’s at this time, both in subject and style. Nonell and Picasso had shared a studio in Paris after Nonell followed him to the French capital in 1897 (where he remained until 1900), and back in Barcelona both men frequented the Bohemian El quatre gats café, the hub of Catalonia's Modernista movement, which hosted Picasso’s first solo exhibition in its main room. As artists, on the periphery of society themselves, both men chose to side with, and to paint, the marginalised and the dejected – the reprobates, performers, harlequins, prostitutes, vagabonds – imbuing them with dignity and individuality, rather as Millet had raised the humble peasant to a noble being.

In his quest to advocate the gitana, her vulnerability and her humanity, Nonell’s aesthetic is in stark contrast to that of his contemporaries Ignacio Zuloaga and Julio Romero de Torres and their more folkloric view of the gypsy, as performer, seductress, or symbol of the Spanish psyche. Nonell’s interest in the gitana as outcast derived in part from his friendship with Juli Vallitjana, a fellow member of the Colla del Safrá, a group of plein air painters, who was an expert in the culture and language of the gypsies. And in part from the work of Steinlen, Daumier and Forain which he had seen in Paris.