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Lot description
SEGUNDO MATILLA (Madrid, 1862 - Teià, Barcelona, 1937). "Fishermen and Boats on the Beach". Oil on canvas. Signed in the lower right corner. Size: 51 x 81 cm; 63 x 92 cm (frame). Segundo Matilla manages to capture in this canvas a fleeting instant, an everyday scene endowed nevertheless with a lyricism, a sober expressiveness linked to the East (something also appreciable in the composition itself, in his appreciation of the emptiness and the faint and changing tones), which the artists of the Generation of '98 also knew how to appreciate, although capturing the nakedness of the Castilian landscape instead of the stripped coastal landscape that Matilla shows us here. Although born in Madrid, Matilla trained and developed his career in Barcelona. He studied at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts under the direction of Antonio Caba. An outstanding representative of Spanish Impressionism, he took part in numerous exhibitions and official competitions held in Barcelona, such as the group exhibitions organised by the Círculo Artístico (1895), the International Exhibitions of 1891, 1894, 1896 and 1898 (honourable mention in 1891) and the Art Exhibitions of 1918 and 1919. In 1897 he received an honourable mention at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid for his painting "Lavanderas de Galicia" ("Washerwomen of Galicia"). He also showed his work in Paris, taking part in exhibitions such as the Salon des Artistes Français in 1897. His solo exhibitions included those held at the Salón Vilches in Madrid and, in Barcelona, at the Sala Parés (from 1907) and the Pallarés Galleries (1942), the latter a posthumous tribute. Several of his works exhibited there were bought by the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid, and many others were exported to America. Particularly successful was his very large exhibition (150 works) held at the Sala Parés in 1914, which was unanimously praised by the critics of the time. The following year he was shown in Madrid at the Salón Vilches, where all the works exhibited were sold. His landscapes of the Empordà, Camprodón, Port de la Selva and Cadaqués were a great success with the public and critics. A painter endowed with astonishing skill, a marked personality full of sensitivity, a mastery of drawing and painting technique and an overflowing capacity for work, Segundo Matilla was an excellent painter who cultivated absolutely all genres, being a great landscape and marine painter, painting portraits of great quality, especially of people from the world of show business, and his vases and still lifes were also highly appreciated. His paintings of bullfighting themes, painted with great spontaneity and full of movement, demonstrate his great fondness for the art of Cúchares. Within the landscape genre, Matilla showed a predilection for the evening hours, in the manner of Eliseo Meifrèn. He always painted in a totally intelligible manner and without any kind of reflective complications, ignoring absolutely all the artistic trends of his time. Segundo Matilla was also the teacher of outstanding painters of the following generation, including his nephew, Joaquim Terruella, and Antoni Rosell Altamira. His work is currently exhibited in various museums, such as the aforementioned Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, the Prado Museum (works on deposit at the Economic Court of the Central Administration and the Municipal Museum of Malaga), the Pablo Gargallo Museum in Zaragoza and the National Art Museum of Catalonia, as well as in important international private collections.