Pueblo en terrazas

Joaquim Mir painted this terraced hillside around 1909, the village of Maspujols in the Tarragona countryside dissolving into patches of hot, almost arbitrary colour. What is striking is how he got there on his own. Unlike most ambitious Catalan painters of his generation, Mir never went to Paris and was not working from the French Impressionists. He had spent the years just before this on Mallorca, painting its rocky coves with more and more intense colour until a breakdown and a fall sent him back to the mainland. Here the village barely holds its shape against the blaze of the terraces and sky, colour carrying far more of the picture than drawing does.