Ramon Casas

In 1897 a café opened in Barcelona on the ground floor of a new mock-Gothic building, and for six years it was the beating heart of Catalan bohemia. It was called Els Quatre Gats, the Four Cats, modelled on the Chat Noir cabaret in Paris, and one of its founders was the painter Ramon Casas. He paid for much of it and hung it with his own work. For the wall he painted himself and his partner Pere Romeu pedalling a tandem bicycle, two grinning men going nowhere against the Barcelona skyline.

Casas came from a wealthy Catalan family and had trained in Paris, and he became the great portraitist of his city's elite. In charcoal and chalk he drew hundreds of the writers, politicians and artists who passed through, in quick, elegant likenesses. He also painted crowds, from the audience at a bullfight to a garrotting in the street.

A teenage Pablo Picasso was among the regulars at the Four Cats and had his first solo show there in 1900. Casas meanwhile turned to posters and postcards, and his flat, curling Art Nouveau designs helped fix the look of the movement Catalans call modernisme.