SEGUNDO MATILLA (Madrid, 1862 - Teià, Barcelona, 1937)."Coastal landscape at dawn.Oil on canvas.

SEGUNDO MATILLA (Madrid, 1862 - Teià, Barcelona, 1937).
"Coastal landscape at dawn.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Size: 51 x 81 cm; 63 x 92 cm (frame).
In this work Segundo Matilla offers us a melancholic and evocative landscape, a sample of the lyricism of the everyday, of the poetry hidden behind the familiar and close landscape. He develops a composition of great simplicity, based on the horizontal plane of the sea, which delimits the two halves of the painting, different in width. In fact, behind the narrow, bright strip of the sea, there is a wide expanse of sky, worked with exquisite sensitivity using very slight tonal variations and points of light, reflecting with naturalism and poetry the imposing beauty of the dawn sky, its double quality of cold atmosphere and warm, perfectly harmonious light. In the foreground, this omnipresent sky is multiplied through the reflections in the water, smooth as a mirror and worked with a lightness that seeks to contrast with the solidity of the earth, with its darker, more opaque tones.
Although born in Madrid, Matilla trained and developed his career in Barcelona. He studied at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts under the direction of Antonio Caba. An outstanding representative of Spanish Impressionism, he took part in numerous exhibitions and official competitions held in Barcelona, such as the group exhibitions organised by the Círculo Artístico (1895), the International Exhibitions of 1891, 1894, 1896 and 1898 (honourable mention in 1891) and the Art Exhibitions of 1918 and 1919. In 1897 he received an honourable mention at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid for his painting "Lavanderas de Galicia" ("Washerwomen of Galicia"). He also showed his work in Paris, taking part in exhibitions such as the Salon des Artistes Français in 1897. His solo exhibitions included those held at the Salón Vilches in Madrid and, in Barcelona, at the Sala Parés (from 1907) and the Pallarés Galleries (1942), the latter a posthumous tribute. Several of his works exhibited there were bought by the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid, and many others were exported to America. Particularly successful was his very large exhibition (150 works) held at the Sala Parés in 1914, which was unanimously praised by the critics of the time. The following year he was shown in Madrid at the Salón Vilches, where all the works exhibited were sold. His landscapes of the Empordà, Camprodón, Port de la Selva and Cadaqués were a great success with the public and critics. A painter endowed with astonishing skill, a marked personality full of sensitivity, a mastery of drawing and painting technique and an overflowing capacity for work, Segundo Matilla was an excellent painter who cultivated absolutely all genres, being a great landscape and marine painter, painting portraits of great quality, especially of people from the world of show business, and his vases and still lifes were also highly appreciated. His paintings of bullfighting themes, painted with great spontaneity and full of movement, demonstrate his great fondness for the art of Cúchares. Within the landscape genre, Matilla showed a predilection for the evening hours, in the manner of Eliseo Meifrèn. He always painted in a totally intelligible manner and without any kind of reflective complications, ignoring absolutely all the artistic trends of his time. Segundo Matilla was also the teacher of outstanding painters of the following generation, including his nephew, Joaquim Terruella, and Antoni Rosell Altamira. His work is currently exhibited in various museums, such as the aforementioned Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, the Prado Museum (works on deposit at the Economic Court of the Central Administration and the Municipal Museum of Malaga), the Pablo Gargallo Museum in Zaragoza and the National Art Museum of Catalonia, as well as in important international private collections.