Santiago Rusiñol Biography | Oil Paintings

After finishing school Santiago Rusiñol y Prats worked for his family in the textile businesses for a short time, since the time he was a teenager he showed a strong interest in painting, so he left to become an artist. He was largely self-taught before he entered the Centre d'Aquarelistes de Barcelona, under the eye of Tomas Moragas. At the age of seventeen, in 1878 he exhibited his first painting at the Museum of Girona.

Santiago Rusiñol moved to Paris in 1888, where he stayed for seven years and lived in Montmartre with Ramon Casas and Ignacio Zuloaga. During this time, his paintings adopted gray tonalities following the manner of James Whistler and became influenced by the Impressionists. He became familiar with Symbolism and en plein air painting. His paintings of that period are basically landscapes, urban themes, portraits and also Art Nouveau symbolic compositions, but after traveling to Andalusia in 1896, he started to paint beautiful gardens scenes including human figures but later eliminated the figures from his landscapes.

When he returned to Barcelona from 1897 to 1903, he became one of the most active proponents of the new Art Nouveau movement joining other painters and avant-garde writers who met in the bar Els Quatre Gats (the four cats), whose name they adopted as their own.

Santiago Rusiñol y Prats first visited the town of Sitges in 1881, fell in love with it and moved there from Barcelona in 1894, when he bought a house to exhibit his enormous collection of forged iron, glass pieces, and paintings that today are part of the "Cau Ferrat Museum". Santiago Rusiñol's enthusiasm for Sitges was based on the beauty of the surrounding area, and also because of the interesting school of painters there named "Escola Luminista," who included, Felip Massó, Arcadi Mas I Fondevila, Joan Roig I Soler, and Joaquim de Miró.

In addition to his life as a painter, he also was a writer of some repute. Santiago Rusiñol wrote various plays for the theater, and had enormous success, like "Els Jocs Florals de Canprosa", "El Pati Blau", and also a large series of dramas, comedies, and vaudeville. He went to Argentina in 1910 to display his works in Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Córdoba for the centenary of the May Revolution.

Art Movement: Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Impressionism.
He Traveled To France, Argentina.
Painters Santiago Rusiñol Influenced: Pablo Picasso.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.