Eliseo MEIFRÉN ROIG 1859-1940

Eliseu Meifrèn i Roig was born in Barcelona on the 24th of December, 1857, and died in the same city on the 5th of February, 1940. Spanish painter attached to the impressionism.

Biography

Passionate about painting, he abandoned the career in medicine and enrolled at the School of Fine Arts of Barcelona. Your teachers were the artists Antoni Caba and Ramon Martí Alsina. He completed his training in Paris, where he went for the first time to the year 1879, in the company of the painters Ramón Casas and Santiago Rusiñol, where he survived by selling small paintings and notes, thematic predominantly urban. That same year he won the first prize at the Regional Exhibition of Beautiful Arts of Valencia. It was also fundamental to their training stay in Italy, where it is related to catalonian painters like Ramon Tusquets, Arcadi Mas Fondevila. Back to Spain participates in 1881 at the National Exhibition of Madrid. In 1882 he marries Dolores Outhaul, performing on a wedding trip to Paris, where they have established, and will be born their first daughter, Rachel. His first large solo exhibition was in 1889, at the Sala Parés in Barcelona, where he presents sixty oil paintings, almost all in large format. Meifrén surprising everyone, the artist, against the local custom, he decides to auction off all the paintings not sold at the exhibition. On this occasion, his friend Santiago Rusiñol exercised as an adjuster. With the result of the sale, travel to Italy, where he painted, especially in Venice and in Naples.

In 1892 he came back to Paris, and it is to intensify its contact with the impressionistic artists when you start a change in your style of painting. His palette lightens, begins to use shades of light blues, ocher clear and golden, it begins to accentuate all the hues that have the sea and rivers.

In 1897 he moved to the Canary islands, after receiving an invitation from Eusebio Navarro, President of the Gabinete Literario of Las Palmas. Your house has just turned into an academy where people go to young local artists as Néstor Martín Fernández de la Torre, Juan Rodríguez Boots and Ghirlanda, or Tomás Gómez Bosch.

With the turn of the century, the notoriety of Meifrén reaches a maximum point. Mentions and monographs in the newspapers of the time, his works can be found in various exhibitions virtually simultaneous, both in Barcelona and Madrid, as in Paris, Buenos Aires or Montevideo. However, after the commercial failure of his big exhibition in the Artistic Circle of Barcelona, the painter decided to go off and settle in Buenos Aires. There will arrive in march, 1903, and in may of that same year they participate in the National Fine Arts Exhibition, held in the Room Rafael of the Bon Marché. Hanging your oil paintings in the buenos aires Room Witcomb, in which the Spanish José Artal was working as a dealer. . In the same Gallery, Meifrén will organize a large exhibition of Catalan painting in 1904. Seventy-four works by twenty-three different artists, that Meifrén select and which includes five cakes of Picasso, which generated passionate criticism.

But it is in Majorca where he arrives to the maturity of art. Its entire color palette is saturated. The blue become a living element and dynamic, accentuate and intensify the rest of the primary colors. In 1905, after the death of Ricardo Anckermann, Meifrén was appointed Director of lEscola of dArts i Crafts of Palma from where you sponsor a young Joan Fuster Bonnin, a painter who was to become one of the maximum exponents of the art majorcan of the TWENTIETH century.

The year 1906 was re-file paths works in the National Exhibition of Fine Arts of Madrid, and this time, finally, he is awarded the medal of the first class. Throughout this decade a traveller Meifrén returns repeatedly to Argentina, but also returns to France and Italy and visit Belgium to participate in the Universal Exposition of Brussels, 1910, where will receive a silver medal. The year 1911 is named adopted son of Cadaqués, a town in empordà where he lived to seasons, and many summers throughout his life, and is considered the discoverer of art. In the spring of 1886, the artist, after travelling the Catalan coast, reaches the village of the empordà, settling in Port Lligat. The population of Cadaqués will be your inspiration, your refuge, your rest of the summer, where he will share time with their friends and with their colleagues and opponents with the brushes.

In 1915 he traveled to America, taking advantage of the International Exhibition of San Francisco and San Diego, receiving both the medal of honor. At the end of the same year, is set in New York city, where it exposes mostly both landscapes of Mallorca and Cadaques, as paintings made in the same city of New York or in New Jersey. After various vicissitudes, he returned to Barcelona in 1917, where it will continue exposing. His wife, Dolores, died in 1924. The year 1930 was home with Julia Marina Lamana. With the start of the Spanish civil war, Elisha Meifrén and part of his family flee to the town of Manresa, where they will remain refugees until the end of the war, in 1939. That same year, after a period of summer rest in Mallorca with his family, he returned to Barcelona, where he prepares what will be their last exposure. On December 16, 1939, he opened a large solo exhibition at the Sala Gaspar of Barcelona, with great public success and sales. However, a Meifrén already sick may not attend the event. A few weeks later, the artist suffers a deterioration in his state, and died in early February of 1940.

Among the many honors he received throughout his long career, highlights of Knight of the Legion of Honor in France in 1926.

Despite the great diversity of places that I visit around the world, gave relatively little importance to the urban views or the mountains, leaving them in a second plane, being a constant attraction that the artist felt for the coast, the beaches or the rivers. Their strokes strokes distributed, to the naked eye, in a disorderly way, make up the extraordinary landscape with deep lyricism.

Exhibitions

• National exhibition of Fine Arts, Madrid (years 1881, 1884, 1887, 1890, 1892, 1894, 1895, 1897, 1899, 1901, 1904, 1906, 1908, 1912, 1920, 1922, 1924, 1926, 1930, 1932, 1934 and 1936)
• Barcelona exhibition (years 1918, 1919, 1921, 1922)
• Exhibition of Fine Arts of Berlin (the years 1891 and 1896)
• Universal exhibition of Paris (1889 and 1900)
• Universal exhibition of Chicago (1893)
• Universal exposition of Brussels (1910)
• International Art exhibition. Buenos Aires (1910)
• International exhibition, Amsterdam (1912)
• Panama Pacific International Exhibition. San Francisco (1915)
• Panama California Exhibition. San Diego (1915)
• International exhibition in Venice (1924, 1926, 1928, 1930 and 1936)

Works

• View on the Seine, (Oil on canvas, 50 x 96 cm). Museum of the Prado.
• Marina to a buoy (Oil on canvas, 46 x 63 cm). The Prado museum, the deposit in the Provincial Museum of Lugo
• Plaza de Clichy, Paris, 1887 (Oil on canvas, 68 x 109 cm) Museo del Prado, madrid.
• Courtyard (Oil on canvas, 49 x 62 cm) Museo Carmen Thyssen. Malaga
• Garden of Mallorca (Oil on canvas, 75,5 x 100 cm) Museu d'art Modern i Contemporani de Palma
• View of Palm (Oil on cardboard, 31.5 x 45.5 cm) Museu d'art Modern i Contemporani de Palma
• View of Paris (Oil on canvas, 54 x 44 cm) Fundación Amyc. House Museum Fountain of the King
• Cadaqués (Oil on canvas, 60,5 x 80,5 cm) Fundación Amyc. House Museum Fountain of the King
• Bay of Palma (Oil on canvas, 201 x 506 cm) Museo del Prado, deposit in the Presidency of the Government of the Balearic Islands
• The Marne, France (Oil on canvas 60,5 x 80,5 cm) Museu Nacional d' Art de Catalunya
• Rincon Mediterraneo (oil on canvas 53,5 X 45,5)

Awards and recognitions

• 1879 - a gold Medal. Regional exhibition of Valencia
• 1887 - bronze Medal. National exhibition of Fine Arts of Madrid
• 1889 - bronze Medal. Universal exhibition of Paris
• 1890 - bronze Medal. National exhibition of Fine Arts of Madrid
• 1896 - gold Medal. Exhibition of Fine Arts and Art Industries of Barcelona
• 1899 - a silver Medal. National exhibition of Fine Arts of Madrid
• 1900 - bronze Medal. Universal exhibition of Paris
• 1904 - silver Medal. National exhibition of Fine Arts of Madrid
• 1906 - a gold Medal. National exhibition of Fine Arts of Madrid
• 1910 - silver Medal. Universal exhibition of Brussels.
• 1910 - gold Medal. International Art exhibition in Buenos Aires.
• 1915 - gold Medal. International exposition Panama-Pacific San Francisco
• 1915 - gold Medal. International exhibition of San Diego.
• 1926 - Knight of the Legion of Honor of France
• 1935 - Winner of the audience Award Nonell, Barcelona city Council

Bibliography

• Dictionary of Art, Painters of the NINETEENTH century, Editorial LIBSA, 2001. ISBN 84-7630-842-6.
• The Painting and the Sculpture to the Balearic islands. Editorial PP, 1996. ISBN 84-86617-37-5
• Meifrèn. Grans Genis de L Art a Catalunya. Anna Pou - David Di Stefano Pironti. Ciro Ediciones, 2008. ISBN 978-84-96878-33-4.
• Meifrén. Mercè Vidal. Editorial Ausa, 1991. ISBN 84-86329-77-9.
• Meifrén and the Catalan landscape in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. Guillermo Solana (Catalogue MNAC) 2006. ISBN 8495241467.
• Eliseo Meifrén. Essay Biographical and Critical. Bernardino de Pantorba. Editorial Delta, 1942.
• Eliseo Meifrén i Roig 1857-1940. Exhibition catalogue Museum of the NINETEENTH Century, Valencia. Several Authors. Generalitat de Valencia, 2000. ISBN 84-482-2466
• Catalogue of Spanish painting in Buenos Aires. Ana Maria Fernandez Garcia. University of Oviedo, 1997. ISBN 84-7468-928-7.
• Eliseu Meifrén. Maria Lluisa Borras. Manel Mayoral Galeria d'art, 2002.
• Modernity and the avant-garde in the Canary islands. 1900-1939. Jonathan Allen Hernandez, Fernando Castro Borrego. Government of the Canary islands. 2008 ISBN 978-84-7947-581-9
• Memoirs of an Art Gallery. File Witcomb. Marcelo Pacheco, Patricia Artundo. National endowment for the Arts 2000 ISBN 950-9807-64-8
• Spain in Paris. The national image in the Universal Expositions, 1855-1900. Ana Belén Lasheras Pena. University of Cantabria 2009 ISBN 978-84-693-4692-1