All newsStorage Room insight: «Landscape» by Eliseu Meifrèn
This november, we are updating the Storage Room insight with the artwork Landscape, by Eliseu Meifrèn, which was donated to the collection of the Museum of Montserrat in March 2025.
Meifrèn, landscape and marinist painter, is considered one of the painters who introduced the Impressionist movement to Catalonia. He began his training at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where he was a student of Antoni Caba and Ramon Martí Alsina. With them, he began to create romantic and academic landscapes.
In 1878, he moved to Paris to further his artistic studies and knowledge, where he had the opportunity to learn about à plein air painting, which would ultimately influence his parisian landscapes from those years. He also travelled to Italy (Naple, Florence, Venice and Rome), where he met with the circle of Catalan artists formed by Ramon Tusquets, Arcadi Mas i Fondevila, Enric Serra, Antoni Fabrés and Joan Llimona, among others.
Meifrèn was part of the Sitges painting group alongside artists such as Santiago Rusiñol and Ramon Casas. Throughout his career, he exhibited his art in spaces such as the Barcelona Watercolourists' Centre and the Sala Parés gallery in the late 1880s. He participated in the Paris Salon des Beaux-Arts in 1890 and, alongside Rusiñol and Casas, in the Salon des Indépendants in 1892. He was awarded the gold medal at the Valencia Regional Exhibition in 1879 and third medals at the 1889 and 1899 Paris Exposition (Exposition Universelle of 1889 and 1899), among other distinctions.
His landscapes evolved from a more academic and romantic style towards a fully impressionistic language, abandoning formal preciousness in favour of a looser brushstroke and a lighter palette. His conception of the light is close to symbolism and falls within the orbit of the Modest Urgell.