Agustín Riancho (Entrambasmestas, Cantabria, 1841-Alceda, Cantabria, 1929)

Agustín Riancho's career is unique in 19th-century Spanish portraiture. During his long sojourn in Belgium in the 1860s and 1870s, he assimilated the new realistic trends which had been spreading through French influence. At that time, he developed a taste for using black tones and thick, weighty material applied in broad brushstrokes. Given his predilection for river motifs, he often visited rivers during his stay in Valladolid late in the century, and afterward, upon his return to Cantabria, near his hometown, Entrambasmestas, where he painted in complete solitude. At that time, he expressed the power of northern Spain's nature with extremely intense energy in his depiction of the Cantabrian forest, trees, rivers and waterfalls. Towards the end of his life, when he was quite elderly, he painted in ochre, grey and black tones applied with thick, impasto brushstrokes in daubs of colour with no outlines. This profound immersion in nature, with which he was intimately familiar, fascinated Santiago Corral, who assembled thirteen of his works. Furthermore, the ancestors of his wife, María del Pilar López-Dóriga y Pombo, had been the artist's leading patrons early in his career.

Aureliano de Beruete (Madrid, 1845-1912)

The founder of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Learning Institution) and a collector, art historian and fervent music lover, Beruete was the most highly educated painter of his generation. His landscapes managed to show a profound, original vision of the ancient Castilian cities, especially Toledo, where he painted almost every year, as well as Segovia, Ávila and Cuenca. He also worked in different European cities, some of them quite popular with painters, like Eastbourne, Quimperlé and The Hague. His love of mountains, a characteristic of his fellow members of the Free Institution of Education, led him to paint the Guadarrama mountains, the backbone of Spain, in works that pay tribute to Velázquez, who depicted them in the backgrounds of his portraits and to whom Beruete dedicated an invaluable monograph. He also painted the Alps, the heart of Europe, on three successive journeys there. After 1903, he used pure tones and fragmented brushstrokes in the Impressionist style, as seen in the glints in his paintings of Manzanares, which are interpreted with a fluency and freedom that reveal his familiarity with Velázquez. The sum of Beruete's paintings assembled by Entrecanales and Corral comprise a set unmatched in quantity and quality by any other collection.

Darío de Regoyos (Ribadesella, Asturias, 1857-Barcelona, 1913)

Among Spanish landscape artists, Regoyos had the most contact with the international trends since his youthful sojourn in Brussels, one of Europe's hotspots of innovation. Coupled with his continuous drive to explore, this made him the most modern Spanish artist. His proximity to symbolism from one of its most original sources, Belgium; his assimilation of Impressionism and Pointillism, bolstered by his friendship with Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac; and his interest in painting landscapes in a novel way turned him into an influential touchstone, especially in the Basque Country, where he lived much of his life. The number and kind of works assembled by José Entrecanales and Santiago Corral mean that his valuable Neo-Impressionist period (a movement that no other Spanish artist cultivated) is properly represented: the damp landscape of the Basque Country, the fascination with the historical past, the interest in Granada and his late years in Barcelona. His attention to the industrial transformation of the estuary of Bilbao, Las Arenas ferry bridge and the Ormáiztegui viaduct is particularly noteworthy because of both its quality and its association with the two engineers' profession.

Francisco Gimeno (Tortosa, Tarragona, 1858-Barcelona, 1927)

Gimeno's artistic personality is very unique and in fact marginal compared to his contemporaries. After his early local training with decorative painters, in 1884 he moved to Madrid, where he became a disciple of Carlos de Haes and studied the Golden Age masters in the Prado Museum. Three years later he returned to Catalonia, where he spent his entire career. His paintings, which feature earth tones, thick impasto and energetic strokes, are the outcome of an intuitive temperament. Many of the motifs he rendered were found inside forests, where the artist felt totally enveloped by the landscape and captured it with keen immediacy. His original, direct way of approaching nature without downplaying the ruggedness of the rocks and ravines, captured through dense and sometimes arid material, primarily attracted Santiago Corral, who managed to assemble 31 of Gimeno's works. The majority are from his later period, after 1917, when the higher quality of the pigments he used enabled him to achieve more varied colours through lusher execution.

Santiago Rusiñol (Barcelona, 1861-Aranjuez, Madrid, 1931)

A cultivated man who fervently promoted art nouveau and symbolism through his work as a writer and artist, Rusiñol is primarily known as a painter of gardens, but he tackled other themes, as well. His dedication to collecting in Cau Ferrat, a museum he founded in Sitges (Barcelona), led him to travel widely. With this goal in mind, he moved to Ibiza in winter 1913, where he painted Puig des Molins, a site with a rich archaeological past where he undertook excavations and was attracted to windmills, which he depicted in the background of this painting. These constructions had captured his attention on his previous stays on the neighbouring island of Mallorca. The delicate perception of this artist, who was used to working from life, is revealed in the nuances of the dusky colours. Equally fascinated by the bright colours found inside Ibizan houses, he went back to the courtyard motifs that he had painted 20 years earlier in Sitges. This reveals the painter's evolution in the brightness of the blue tones in the background, the self-assuredness of the brushstrokes that capture the masses of colour, and the appropriateness of an organised, frontal composition.

Joaquín Sorolla (Valencia, 1863-Cercedilla, Madrid, 1923)

Based on his training in Valencia, Sorolla felt attracted by the landscape, which he painted in small sketches. He began to make larger paintings after 1896, when he discovered Jávea. His countless journeys after 1900, coupled with the stimulus of his friendship with Beruete, led to what he called his studies: intense sketches of motifs from Spain's geography painted on-site. He started making them out of sheer interest, but in the latter decade he was spurred by the need for settings for the scenes on the panels of his Vision of Spain for The Hispanic Society of America. José Entrecanales was a major collector of Sorolla's paintings. One of the works assembled here shows the echoes that his most famous work, Afternoon Sun, and his favourite theme of coming back from fishing, left on his subsequent works. Another reveals his interest in the gardens of the Royal Alcázar of Seville, the model of the one of the gardens he designed for his own home-studio in Madrid. His sojourns in San Sebastián towards the end of his career sparked new interpretations, with extremely broad brushstrokes in his view of Mount Urgull and very synthetic, modern ones in San Sebastián. Breakwater Promenade.