Blay customarily made versions of fragments of his works, which he handled separately. This sculpture at the Museo del Prado is a fragment from the group titled The Onset of Winter. During his stay in Rome in 1892, Blay made a terracotta model of an old man and a girl, both dressed, suffering the rigors of winter. For the expanded version, he tested nude figures to see if they would be more expressive and to properly develop the anatomies that he later intended to clothe. Given the success of these magnificent anatomical studies, especially the rawness of the aged body of the old man, he decided to leave the figures undressed, and he was encouraged to do so by Spanish artists who visited his studio and pointed out their undeniable quality. He managed to reinforce the contrast between the old man’s realism and the softness of the sleeping girl in search of human warmth, very effectively transmitting the distress and suffering, the old man’s concern and the little girl’s ingenuousness, as well as the absence of a maternal figure. Some historians have also detected a symbolist approach in this work. Blay presented the plaster group at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1892 in Madrid, obtaining the First-Class Medal. The public and critics were unanimous in their assessment that in this work he “demonstrated that he possessed the temperament of a firm and confident sculptor.”

With its moving and expressive capacity and its formal language, the Museo del Prado’s sculpture is an example of naturalist realism, an excellent anatomical rendering carefully crafted with a taste for the anecdotal. In its sobriety, this work resembles sculptures from the French tradition, drawing the figure out of the unpolished block, sculpting the girl’s tender face in a dissolving manner and transcending a merely narrative presentation by transmitting the human need for protection. Blay unquestionably demonstrates his skill in conveying emotion and, most of all, his interest at that time in expressing social realism (Text drawn from Azcue, L.: Solidez y belleza. Miguel Blay en el Museo del Prado, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2016, pp. 22-24).