Jaume Morera y Galicia
A view of Santa Coloma de Queralt painted in 1877 by the Spanish painter Jaime Morera y Galicia. The work is vibrant and luminous, two of the Catalan artist’s hallmarks.
Oil on panel
Signed lower right
Dimensions: 35 x 23 cm
Price: 5800 euros
Jaume Morera y Galicia stayed in Santa Coloma de Queralt, Tarragona province, in 1877.
The painter plunges us into the heart of a busy street in the town of Santa Coloma de Queralt, in the province of Tarragona in Catalonia, where he stayed in 1877. The work was most probably painted during this stay.
On the right, we can see some of the columns of the town’s central market square.
Jaume Morera y Galicia is renowned for his vibrant landscapes and his mastery of light.
Here, he captures the hustle and bustle of the city’s bustling street with a bird’s-eye view and a vibrant, dynamic touch that blends impressionism and realism. The Catalan sun illuminates the scene.
Biography
Jaume Morera i Galícia, born in Lérida and died in Madrid, was a Catalan landscape painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
he was one of Carlos de Haes’ disciples. He traveled extensively. His work depicts landscapes realistically, based on direct observation of nature.
He trained in Madrid, at the San Fernando Academy and under Carlos de Haes, where he began to assert a more personal style.
Between April 1874 and 1877, he attended the first boarding school organized by the Académia Española de Bellas Artes in Rome.
As part of the training program, in 1875 he visited Paris, Belgium and Brittany. The boarding school’s second trip, in 1876, took him to Egypt and Greece.
In 1878, he settled permanently in Madrid, from where he traveled to Holland, Belgium and France as a disciple of Carlos de Haes. He exhibited at the 1878 Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes and at the Paris Universal Exhibition.
He painted northern landscapes and the Spanish Basque country, where he also spent long periods at his villa Jardingane in Algorta (Vizcaya).
In 1884 and 1886, he traveled to Normandy, Brittany and Holland with de Haes. He presented works from this trip at several exhibitions, and won a first-class medal at the National Fine Arts Exhibition (Madrid) in 1892.
From 1890 onwards, Morera began a tour of the Sierra de Guadarrama that resulted in the artist’s most personal work for which he would become known.
The result of this activity was a series of twenty-three paintings that represent his most mature work, and which were widely distributed at the time, mainly thanks to their presentation at the Spanish national exhibitions of 1897, 1901 and 1904, and at other European exhibitions. He became the great disseminator of the theme of high mountains, while at the same time establishing himself as one of the benchmarks of the new Spanish realist landscape.
The Exposició d’Artistes Lleidatans (ca) in Lleida in 1912 marked the beginning of a rapprochement with his native land – which he had always visited regularly – and led to the creation of a museum, the Museu d’Art Jaume Morera, inaugurated in 1917.
The latter houses an important collection of twentieth-century Irish art, as well as works by Jaume Morera, his colleagues from the Escuela de Madrid and Irish artists of the early twentieth century.
He died on April 23, 1927 at his home in Madrid, from where he was transferred to Getxo to be buried with the highest honors by his friends and the authorities.
Museums
Spain
– Lerida, Museu d’Art Jaume Morera
– Madrid, Prado Museum
– Barcelona, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya
– Museo de Las Bellas Artes de La Corona , Galicia
France
– Paris , Musée d’Orsay
