Bathing in Rentería - Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

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Bathing in Rentería

Regoyos, Darío de

Ribadesella, Asturias, 01/11/1857-Barcelona, 29/10/1913

Oil on canvas

76.5 x 57.5 cm

Regoyos (bottom left hand corner)

1900

Early 20th century

82/146

Contributed by the City Council of Bilbao in 1913

In the month of July 1900, while Regoyos was living in Buenavista (Irun, Gipuzkoa), he took an outing through Rentería, where he made this oil painting. In it, he captures his entire experience as an Impressionist painter, in both its facture, using his Pointillist knowledge to paint certain zones, and in the importance he confers on sunlight and shadows. This canvas unquestionably depicts a scene near the town in Gipuzkoa, in the evening, judging from the elongated shadows and the position of the mountains, in an atmosphere which indicates that the weather was perfect for bathing although the heat was not yet scorching.

The author has situated himself as an observer in the hill that appears in the foreground, although, as later discovered, he was not alone there, as he painted a seated boy, whom he later erased. In many of his oil paintings, Regoyos tended to situate the observation point considerably higher than his own height in order to offer a broader perspective, although he did not in this work, where he placed it only slightly higher, probably because he was on top of the hill, so he could depict the landscape he wanted to capture in greater depth.

The layout of the pictorial space is perfectly balanced between the distant plane made up of the sky and horizon, the fields in the middle ground, including the hills, and the foreground, which contains the river. Worth noting is the central pictorial motif, "nude children bathing", which is clearly in line with the thematic trends of the Impressionists during those years because of the freedom of expression and contact with nature that they conveyed, which is reinforced by the presence of a boy about to bathe quickly taking off his clothes, as shown in the painting.

Regoyos must have been impressed by the landscape he saw from this hilltop and by the image of the children bathing freely. It must have reminded him of his early years in Belgium, when he and his friends would bathe on the beaches of Heisst in the summertime, alarming the natives with their lack of clothing and their activity.

This work is masterfully executed in terms of both the colours and its approach and facture, including the effects of the sunlight and the shadows that the trees cast on the ground, the river and the nearby lands. Likewise, he faithfully depicts the roiling of the river waters, which reflect the blue of the sky and the stirred images of the children. Moreover, Regoyos quite skilfully brings depth to the work through the proper gradation of tones in the mountains and middle lands, and he thus attains a painting on par with the best Impressionists from those years.

Darío de Regoyos was the only Spanish painter with close ties to the fin-de-siècle movements which freed art in Belgium and France. His works spanned from Pre- Impressionism to Symbolism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. He alternated living in Brussels and Spain from 1879 to 1890. He was a member of the circle of L'Essor (1881-1882), where he met the Belgian painters Théo van Rysselberghe, James Ensor, Willy Schlobach and Frantz Charlet, and the sculptor Constantin Meunier. He founded the circle of Les XX (1884-1893) along with these painters and Felicien Rops, Fernand Khnopff, Henry van de Velde, Jan Toorop, Georges Lemmen and Paul Signac, among others, and he later exhibited with its successor, the group La Libre Esthétique.

Throughout his lifetime, he befriended prominent representatives from all spheres of art. His painter friends included Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro and James Abbott McNeill Whistler; he also mingled with writers, art critics and novelists, including Georges Rodenbach, Camille Lemonnier, Octave Maus and Edmond Picard; and in the field of music he was a friend of Enrique Fernández Arbós, Isaac Albéniz, Eusebio Daniel Campalans, Enric Morera i Viura, Gabriel Fauré and Vincent d'Indy. However, without a doubt, one of the most important relationships was the one he forged with his close friend, the poet Émile Verhaeren, with whom he travelled around Spain in 1888 and Italy in 1889, and with whom he wrote and decorated the book España negra. His love of music, poetry and literature led him to be portrayed playing the guitar 14 times by Meunier (two portraits), Whistler (one portrait), Ensor (three portraits) and Van Rysselberghe (eight portraits).

Regoyos was also a major promoter of art in the Basque Country along with the painters Manuel Losada, Juan de Echevarría, Adolfo Guiard, Anselmo Guinea, Ignacio Zuloaga, Benito Barrueta and Pablo Uranga, the sculptor Paco Durrio and the ceramist Daniel Zuloaga. With them he organised the Modern Art exhibitions in Bilbao and later created the Association of Basque Artists. [Juan San Nicolás]

Selected bibliography

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  • Ybarra, Gregorio de. "Notas sobre el Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao", Zumárraga : revista de Estudios Vascos, n° 5 extra. 1956. p. 57.
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  • Fernández Avello, Manuel. Pintores asturianos. Oviedo, Banco Herrero, 1971. p. 113. (titulado Niños bañándose)
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