8/6/23 - Acquisition - Paris, Musée d’Orsay - Highly acclaimed last November at Paris Fine Arts & La Biennale, where it was presented by the Mendes gallery (see article->10127]), Adrià Gual’s large canvas of Joan of Arc has been acquired by the Musée d’Orsay. This is the first work by the artist to join the collections, adding to the still small body of Spanish and Catalan paintings already conserved. The Hispanic collection was also recently honoured by the retrospective Antoni Gaudí [1] and the special exhibition Mariano Fortuny y Marsal [2]. The large canvas will soon join the permanent exhibition, where it will be displayed on the Médian Seine level alongside other representations of Joan of Arc, including the monumental Pucelle by the British artist Frank Craig, and paintings with chivalric and Wagnerian subjects that were very much in vogue in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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- Adrià Gual (1872-1943)
Joan of Arc, 1901
Oil on canvas - 132 x 149 cm
Paris, Musée d’Orsay
Photo: Galerie Mendes - See the image in its page
Signed and dated lower left "Adrià Gual MCMI", the canvas was painted by Adrià Gual during a trip to Paris in 1901. As stated in the Musée d’Orsay’s notice [3], it has never been exhibited and may have been a project for the decoration of a private chapel in Paris, the trace of which has now been lost. Riding a barded horse at full gallop, Joan of Arc is depicted in armour, holding a long tricoloured standard resting on her shoulder in her right hand. The flag is the emblem of the French Republic, with an unusual Sacred Heart of Jesus at its centre, which at the time could allude to the rallying of Catholics to the Third Republic. The naked head of the warrior girded with a halo evokes the campaign then being waged by Catholics for her beatification and canonisation, achieved in 1909 and 1920 respectively. A refined composition with sketchy brushstrokes and vivid colours, this equestrian portrait with a Symbolist element bears the imprint of French Cloisonnism, which, like other new artistic trends, was imported from Paris by Barcelona’s artistic avant-garde in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
A major figure in the Catalan modernist movement, largely unknown in France, as is the case of Spanish art in the "between two centuries", as the Musée de l’Orangerie pointed out in 2011-2012 (see article), Adrià Gual is nonetheless better known in his own country as a writer and playwright. As the notice from the Mendes gallery points out, he and his theatre company Theatre Intìm staged a number of plays inspired by the greatest European authors, such as Maurice Maeterlinck, at Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona, a meeting place for a whole generation of artists that included Rusiñol, Utrillo, Miró, Sert and Picasso. His work includes a large number of preparatory drawings for his performances, posters, ex libris and illustrations for literary magazines, but few paintings, which were confined to the years 1890-1900.