THE VILLAGE & THE SEA

The world of the sea and the world of the mountain, sometimes only a few kilometers apart, come face to face: villages with ports and hamlets in the mountains, a short distance from each other, but which codify their vision of color in a different manner, as each artist does with his brush. The farmer gathers the harvest and stores the sheaves of straw during days of physical fatigue; little by little, the green of the fields turns into the ocher and pale yellow of the harvest and the dried haystacks. Guiard will be the first Impressionist painter in Spain, resorting to outdoor painting and adopting that detailed language of small brush strokes that the Italians termed the scoperta del vero. Outdoor painting means, above all, seeing in nature, pictorially appropriating the light of the place. Before the harvest drudgery (in Guiard) is the heroic world of the sea and the struggle against gales and storms (in Maeztu), as well as the urge to excel in the rowboat regattas, the notion of sport or play to which Friedrich Schiller's German romanticism alludes to: sport as the spirit of self-achievement, with no other material aim in mind.