Youth (Portrait of my daughter)
1915. Oil on canvas.Not on display
Josefa Pla Navarro (Madrid, 1901–Plencia, Vizcaya, 1988). Daughter of the painter and Valentina Navarro. Within Cecilio Pla’s portrait production, this is the portrait that best defines the plastic language of this master’s mature style: a true pure synthesis of light and colour. It depicts a girl who is about 16 years old, portrayed bust-length. With her voluminous hair tied up in a large bow, she wears a white blouse ornamented with a bouquet of flowers. Her pose reveals a smiling face in front of a multi-coloured mass of flowers in the background. Her cheek rests on her right arm.
On this occasion, Pla takes his proverbial taste for the play of backlighting to the extreme. He makes the most of the decorative effects of light. Hence, he skilfully plunges the girl’s face into a soft shadow, modelling her features with the reflections of the blouse. At the same time, her silhouette is perfectly defined against the radiant sun enlightening the foliage in the background. He creates a true tapestry of radiant multi-coloured light, resolved with extraordinary pictorial richness based on strong impasto and energetic touches of the brush, with an exalted and delighted luminosity, with which he achieves a beautiful decorative effect that constitutes the main attraction of the painting.
Museo Nacional del Prado, Maestros de la pintura valenciana: del siglo XIX en el Museo del Prado, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado Autoridad Portuaria, 1997, p.182-183 nº37
