"The sick understood that those hours of rest, of deceptive calm... gave them morphine." So wrote the Spanish painter Santiago Rusiñol in the Catalan artist and literary magazine Pèl & Ploma. And he knew what he was talking about. For Rusiñol, as the black sheep of a dynasty of textile manufacturers, was himself addicted to the fashion drug of the 19th century. In 1899, after five years of addiction, he had to go through rehab. One of his most famous paintings - "la morfina" (The Morphine Addict) - gives an idea of what the artist must have suffered during this period.
Santiago Rusiñol was born on 25 February 1861 in Barcelona and died on 13 June 1931 in Aranjuez. At 28, he turned his back on upper middle-class life and left his wife and child to study painting in Paris for four years. There he lived the typical life of a bohemian in the Montmartre quarter. His painting was strongly influenced by the Impressionists and he cultivated plein-air painting like the representatives of this epoch.
At the beginning of his artistic career, Rusiñol chose urban and human motifs in addition to landscapes. After his rehab, he painted almost exclusively deserted gardens and parks in a contrasting chiaroscuro until his death.
Besides painting, Rusiñol was equally successful in literature.
"The sick understood that those hours of rest, of deceptive calm... gave them morphine." So wrote the Spanish painter Santiago Rusiñol in the Catalan artist and literary magazine Pèl & Ploma. And he knew what he was talking about. For Rusiñol, as the black sheep of a dynasty of textile manufacturers, was himself addicted to the fashion drug of the 19th century. In 1899, after five years of addiction, he had to go through rehab. One of his most famous paintings - "la morfina" (The Morphine Addict) - gives an idea of what the artist must have suffered during this period.
Santiago Rusiñol was born on 25 February 1861 in Barcelona and died on 13 June 1931 in Aranjuez. At 28, he turned his back on upper middle-class life and left his wife and child to study painting in Paris for four years. There he lived the typical life of a bohemian in the Montmartre quarter. His painting was strongly influenced by the Impressionists and he cultivated plein-air painting like the representatives of this epoch.
At the beginning of his artistic career, Rusiñol chose urban and human motifs in addition to landscapes. After his rehab, he painted almost exclusively deserted gardens and parks in a contrasting chiaroscuro until his death.
Besides painting, Rusiñol was equally successful in literature.
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