At work
Ca. 1908. Oil on canvas.On display elsewhere
This painting is very typical of the artist´s dedication to genre painting from the period after his success at the National Exhibitions. It was no longer necessary for him to work in large format in order to secure his career and, with a few exceptions, he hardly employed it in his compositions at that time. He preferred smaller canvases, on which he could work from life, and which were easier to sell. He used to paint costumbrist motifs, such as this one, in a medium format.
The work was probably executed around 1908 or shortly before. It was included in the artist´s personal exhibition which opened in Madrid on 31 December of that year. The painter himself described the subject as a ‘villager who has just prepared his horse to go to the mountains to plough the land, and who has loaded the tools and implements of his work on it’.
It is set in Pajares, like most of his genre paintings from his best period up to 1909. However, the apparent simplicity of the composition reveals as in most of the painter´s works, a certain complexity of spaces, graduated in depth with an appropriate treatment of the light from the outside to the stable, with the porch in between. There is also a clear rhythm from left to right in the arrangement of the few elements and, as is often the case with the artist, the window in the background is a sort of echo of the larger opening of the door. The tones are warm, in a very reduced range but with a wide variety of shades in the delicate tones of chestnut and soft greys, with a single red note that enlivens the second term, according to a restricted use of this very frequent red colour in the artist in these yearsBarón, Javier, Luis Menéndez Pidal en el Prado. Boletín del Museo del Prado, Madrid, Museo del Prado, 2004, p.75-76
