Interior
Ca. 1929. Oil on canvas.On display elsewhere
The painting depicts a young woman, dressed in a luminous white dress, glancing through a book in her library. She is standing, leaning on a table on which other books, a lectern and a vase of lilacs are placed. Behind her, are walls filled with books that are huddled together on ceiling height bookcases. The door of the room, wide open, reveals a sitting room in the background.
This is an intimate work very rich in material, and finished with an uninhibited brushstroke belonging to the Impressionist technique that Martí Garcés learned on his repeated trips around Europe. The intimate, recollected vision of this domestic interior radiates a great sense of calm and wellbeing. The artist makes a decorative and emotional use of colour and light, with strong contrasts and play of colour, evoking the style of the French master Bonnard, though within the boundary of conventional taste. The painting is an example of the intensification of the taste for the decoration of bourgeois interiors and the interest in painting the pleasures of the individual´s intimacy in the last decades of the 19th century.
Martí Garcés, who specialised in his maturity in landscape and interior paintings, produced other works on similar themes, such as another Interior (P008073) exhibited at the Fine Arts 1917 National Fine Arts Exhibition.
El mundo literario en la pintura del siglo XIX del Museo del Prado, Madrid, Centro Nacional de Exposiciones y Promoción Artística, 1994, p.222 nº46
