Ramon Martí Alsina

Almost five metres high and nearly 11 metres wide, The Great Day of Girona is described as the largest easel painting in the history of Catalan art. Ramon Martí Alsina began it in 1863 to show the defenders of Girona, a Catalan city, winning an important victory over French troops during the siege of 1809, in the Peninsular War against Napoleon. It grew into a planned cycle on the war that he never completed. The canvas was later rolled up and stored at the National Art Museum of Catalonia in Barcelona, and it was restored only in 2009 and 2010.

Martí Alsina was born in Barcelona in 1826 and orphaned at eight. He studied philosophy while taking night classes at La Llotja, the city's art school. A trip to Paris in 1848 brought him face to face with the work of Gustave Courbet, the French realist, and the Barbizon landscape painters. Back home he became a central figure of realism in Catalan painting, taught drawing at La Llotja and encouraged his students to paint outdoors.

He was a republican and an anticlerical, and under King Amadeo I, in the early 1870s, he gave up his teaching post rather than swear allegiance to the constitution of 1869. Between 1872 and 1878 he lost his son, his daughter and his wife. Money troubles pushed him into enormous production, and thousands of paintings carry his signature, many of them finished by workshop assistants.