Spanish/Catalan painter, author, and playwright. He trained initially as an artist with Tomas Moraga. After a travel to Paris (1889) where he lived in Montmartre with Ramón Casas and with Ignacio Zuloaga, his picture adapted grey tonalities following the Whistler manner and influenced by Impressionists. His production of that period are basically landscapes, urban themes, portraits and also Art Nouveau symbolic compositions. From 1896 and after a travel to Andalusia, he started to paint gardens.
Rusiñol is best known as a painter of Spanish gardens. However, his paintings should be understood not as an extension of naturalist landscape painting, but as the culmination of a quasi-symbolist artistic vision.
Rusiñol's poetic artistic language has its roots in the time he spent in Paris in the early 1890s, and his association with the Brussels-based avant-garde group of artists known as 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 the 1890s, who invited other artists to exhibit with them. The group gradually became a focus point for symbolist and modernist artists, poets and writers, including James McNeill Whistler, whose influence on the Spanish artist was particularly notable. Rusiñol was struck by the American's ability to imbue nominally realist subject matter with a haunting mood, and there is no doubt that he was particularly influenced by Whistler's portraitGLOSSARYThe Roman portrait bust survived in the form of life-sized reliquaries of saints, but it was in 15th century Florence that the individual features and character of a contemporary sitter were accurately recorded by sculptors such as Donatello, Desiderio da Settignano, Mino da Fiesole and the Rossellino. A similar degree of realism occurs in 15th century tomb sculpture. The equestrian portrait, based on antique statues such as the Marcus Aurelius monument (Rome, Campidoglio), was revived in the 14th century. Two examples in fresco are Simone Martini's Guidoriccio (c. 1328; Siena, Palazzo Pubblico) and the posthumous portrait of Sir John Hawkwood (1436; Florence, Cathedral) by Uccello, which gives the illusion of a 3-dimensional statue seen from below. The Venetian Republic ordered imposing monuments from Donatello (1447; Gattarnelata, Padua) and Verrocchio (14799; Colleoni, Venice), whilst other statesmen ordered their own images to be erected in public places, directly relating themselves to the military heroes of ancient Rome. Another form of political portraiture derived from antiquity was the commemorative portrait medal designed by artists such as Pisanello. The carved or painted profile portrait became popular in the 1450s. The realism of the clear, flattened image, painted under the influence of Flemish examples by the Pollaiuolo brothers, Piero della Francesca and Botticelli, was superseded by the three-quarter and frontal portrait, psychologically more complex, such as Leonardo's enigmatic Mona Lisa (Paris, Louvre) with her momentary smile or Andrea del Sarto's arresting Portrait of a Man (London, National Gallery). The 16th century portrait became generalized, Lotto's Andrea Odoni (1527; Royal Collection) being an idealized concept of a collector rather than an individual. Group portraits, decorating whole rooms, include the narrative scenes of the Gonzaga court painted by Mantegna (completed 1474; Mantua, Palazzo Ducale) and the elaborate schemes commissioned by the Farnese family in Rome from Vasari (1546; Palazzo della Cancelleria) and Salviati (after 1553; Palazzo Farnese). Portraits were also incorporated into religious narratives, as in Ghirlandaio's fresco cycle painted for Giovanni Tornabuoni in S. Maria Novella, Florence (1486-90). of the artist's mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black, executing several portraits of his own in a similar idiom.
Although Rusiñol soon abandoned a monochromatic palette for colours that were extraordinarily resonant, he applied to his gardens the same visual language, that can best be understood in terms of stillness and emptiness, but imbued with a uniquely Spanish languor.
Rusiñol and his friend Casas were responsible for the introduction of Western European influences into painting in Spain.
