Amettlers, on exhibition at Palma’s Es Baluard museum.

Santiago Rusiñol’s enormous Castell del Rei (1902-03) commissioned for Palma’s Gran Hotel.

Santiago Rusiñol’s Amfiteatre.

Pi de Formentor (1922) - Hermen Anglada Camarasa

Can Binimelis (1901) by Mallorcan painter Antoni Gelabert.

La Caleta (1916) by Tito Cittadini, a follower of Hermen Anglada Camarasa

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Palma’s Es Baluard museum and the permanent collection at the Caixa foundation showcase Mallorca’s flourishing landscape-painting tradition

It was, by all accounts, quite an occasion: the bishop blessed, the band played and Mallorca’s smart set tucked into an exquisite gala supper. “We are here today to witness a turning point, a point which marks a before and an after,” said the speaker earnestly as, amid pomp and ceremony, Palma’s Gran Hotel threw open its doors. It was 1903 and Mallorca’s tourist industry was born. No expense was spared on building and decorating this, the island’s first real hotel. And when the landscape scenes in the dining room were unveiled they caused a sensation.

Santiago Rusiñol and Joaquim Mir, the two most celebrated painters on the island at the time, had been commissioned the previous year to paint a series of enormous Mallorcan landscapes. The inclusion of Rusiñol’s and Mir’s murals in the Gran Hotel signalled the growing popularity of Mallorcan landscape painting and it is fitting, perhaps, that the emerging phenomenon of tourism and Mallorcan landscape painting are thus forever linked. Some of the first travellers to flock to the island were painters, for the most part Catalans, and the first resorts were artist colonies in picturesque towns such as Pollensa and Deià. Later, their work was to attract interest from further afield and a whole generation of Argentinian painters came to the island too. The work of these artists was to culminate in a much-acclaimed exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1928.

Landscape painting had only emerged as a popular genre  in Spain in the mid-19th century, explains Marie-Claire Uberquoi, director of Palma’s Es Baluard Museum. Freed from historical and religious references, landscape painting allowed the painter to focus more closely on his relationship with a tangible reality. Artists began to come out of their studios to work outdoors in direct contact with nature. In Spain the Belgian-born artist Carlos de Haes (1826-1898) was the leading figure of landscape painting as well as the pre-eminent master for several generations of Spanish landscape painters.

The new genre soon divided along regional lines in Spain. There was a distinct Mediterranean school of landscape painting and most of the painters who came to Mallorca were Catalan, drawn by the unspoilt vistas and intense light. A case can be made, says art historian Francesc Miralles, that while these Catalan painters contributed much to Mallorcan landscape painting, Spanish landscape painting might have followed a very different path had this Mallorcan stimulus not been there. “Mallorca is a stage,” grants Miralles. “But it is also writing the script.”

At centre stage around the turn of the century were Rusiñol and Mir, who for a while shared a house in Palma.

Rusiñol was by 1903 a widely acclaimed painter and renowned journalist, novelist and dramatist. He had initially come to Mallorca to overcome a morphine addiction and soon found the daily rhythms of provincial life on the island agreeable. His book, a homage to Mallorca titled The Island of Calm, describes a place “where the sun tarries longer,” where “without sleeping, one can rest and dream” and where “you can bathe in light and sunsets”.

Rusiñol was entranced by the Mallorcan light, and light and shadow soon came to dominate his paintings, whether he was painting a field of almonds in flower, a ruined castle, or the stately gardens of Raixa. He was to some extent an Impressionist, as far as technique, light and colours were concerned, but he also developed his own private, lyrical world. For him, painting was more than a medium employed in the real world. It was a spiritual language that transmitted his poetry.

In this he was much influenced by Belgian symbolist William Degouve de Nuncques, who lived in Mallorca between 1899 and 1902 and painted deep, dismal caverns and vast cloudy skies. Symbolists aimed not to depict nature for its own sake but rather to use it to stir up one’s deepest feelings and reawaken primordial yearnings.

Degouve’s work was to have a lasting influence on the work of Rusiñol’s friend Mir. As Rusiñol’s daughter María explained in her Mallorcan memoirs: “Mir always said he had something inside him that would undoubtedly come out some day. I believe that Mallorca and Degouve were the two elements that, converging at the same time, caused the painter to flower and create some of the most captivating landscapes in Spanish painting.”

Mir’s works from this period are an exaltation of unrestrained nature, brimming with bold ranges of colour. He demonstrated that nature need not be portrayed accurately  but was merely a starting point to construct one’s own view of the world.
Feeling he couldn’t live with the expansive personality of his gregarious friend Rusiñol any longer, he became a wild hermit at the remote Sa Calobra beach. Here, he tried obsessively to capture the colours and textures of the desolate landscapes of the Torrent de Pareis by clambering over the rocks and swinging down the precipices on ropes.

After a mysterious fall from a cliff, Mir was admitted to the psychiatric hospital back on the mainland. He re-emerged and continued painting until his death in 1940. He is still considered the most gifted landscape painter of his generation and the key to understanding modern Catalan painting.

In 1909 a third great Catalan landscape painter arrived on the scene: Hermen Anglada Camarasa. Camarasa was already a successful artist. His iridescent nocturnal scenes of Belle Epoque Paris, expressionistic scenes of dance, lively brushwork and intense colours had made him popular worldwide. But in Mallorca, where he moved permanently from Paris at the outbreak of WWI, he was to become first and foremost a landscape painter. Here, says historian Charo Sanjuan, “Anglada discovered the ideal landscape for his bombastic, colourist style of painting.”

Anglada was joined in his Pollensa retreat by his followers, in the most part young painters and dilettantes from the Argentinian and Uruguayan haute bourgeoisie. Some 40 years later Argentinian artist Tito Cittadini recalled his reasons for moving to Mallorca, putting it down to “Anglada’s descriptions. He’d draw the island for me on café tables in Montparnasse.”

With this new influx of artists, Mallorcan landscape painting became a renowned and flourishing school. “From this moment on,” says Francesc Miralles, “every painter on the island is a landscape painter and avant-garde movements never took root.”

When:	Nov-May: 10am-8pm. Jun-Oct 10am-12pm. Mon closed
Where:	Es Baluard, Placa Porta Santa Catalina s/n
Phone:	971 908 200
Price:	€6. Tuesdays €4.50
Web:	Es Baluard Museum CaixaForum, Palma	Where