Isidre NONELL

One artist who seems to have studied the work of Isidre Nonell particularly closely was the young Andalusian painter Pablo Picasso, who spent several years in Barcelona, and who is said to have described Nonell as the local artist he admired the most. (Picasso also rented Nonell’s Montmartre studio, in the latter’s absence, soon after he first arrived in Paris in October 1900, at the age of nineteen.) As another scholar has noted, ‘Isidre Nonell…exercised a special influence on Picasso. The themes of people on the fringe of society which Nonell explored, especially in his strongly expressive gypsies, were developed by Picasso during his Blue Period, especially in Barcelona in 1902.’

Datable to c.1897, the present sheet is closely related to a larger drawing by Isidre Nonell of the same couple, but with the addition of several other figures in the background, in a private collection in Barcelona. Among stylistically comparable drawings by the artist is a study of gypsies, signed and dated 1897, in the collection of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.