REGOYOS Y VALDÉS, Dario de

Spanish painter. He spent his childhood and youth in Madrid, where he began his artistic training under Carlos de Haes, enrolling in his basic landscape course in 1877 where he was taught landscape drawing.

Regoyos's interest in art movements abroad led him to Brussels in 1879, where he stayed with friends, the musicians Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Fernández Arbós. On a recommendation from Carlos de Haes, Regoyos established contact in Brussels with the Belgian painter Joseph Quinaux (1822-1895), who became his most important teacher. Regoyos took painting lessons in the elder artist's studio for two years. During this time he also registered at the École Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where he attended courses under Joseph van Sevendonck.

Regoyos remained in Belgium for lengthy periods until the 1890s. In 1881, he joined L'Essor, a society of artists who subsequently founded the now highly regarded group Les XXGLOSSARYA group that began with 20 Belgian painters and sculptors as well as critics, founded to organize juryless exhibitions following their dissatisfaction with the selection process of the Brussels Academy and the Paris Salon. The group did not represent any one style, but exhibited works of Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau, all together. The artist group played a significant role in the modernization of art in Belgium by inviting foreign artists as well to the exhibitions, including Whistler, Monet, and Renoir. The frequent participation of Signac and Seurat led to the development of an independent Belgian Neo-Impressionism with international flair.Important members of Les Vingts included, among others, James Ensor, Fernand Khnopff, Theo van Rysselberghe, and Henri van der Velde. The group dissolved itself in 1893 after holding a total of 126 exhibitions. in 1883. He was the only non-Belgian artist in the group.

Regoyos's style was the product of continuous interaction with artist-friends, including Pissarro, Whistler, Seurat, Signac, Ensor, and Van Rysselberghe, and with the poet Émile Verhaeren, with whom he collaborated on the publication of La Espana Negra and with whom he travelled through Spain, France and Italy.

Regoyos's oeuvreGLOSSARYThe complete body of works created by an artist. spans several different phases. The first covers his years in Belgium, during which he mainly produced portraits. The second phase is characterised by philosophical and pre-Symbolist elements and falls under the label of the Espana Negra series. The third, in which his style and use of colour show strong affinities with ImpressionismGLOSSARYA style of painting that became prominent in the last quarter of the 19th century as a reaction to the ossified doctrine of the Academy and the content-oriented atelier, historical, and genre painting. The name is derived from the 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet, and first was used by art critics as a mocking description for a group of artists excluded from the official Salon, but who had their own first group exhibition in 1874 at the salon of the Parisian photographer Nadar. Impressionism, as a new type of naturalism, negated classical pictorial methods; based on contemporary theories of physics, it indicated the natural object in a revolutionary fashion - entirely as a manifestation of colour. Their supreme principle was "plein-air" or open-air painting, through which the painters tried to capture a direct, spontaneous impression of what they saw., is the best known. Regoyos showed his work primarily at group exhibitions that aimed to promote the freedom of art. He exhibited in France (often at the Indépendants in Paris and the Galerie Durand-Ruel), Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Britain, Mexico and Argentina.

Regoyos's work was honoured at an exhibition at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid eight years after his death.