The mythification of the artist:
Despite his brief career as a painter – only one decade, from 1878 to 1888 – Joan Figueras Soler (Sabadell, 1863-1921) was a precocious and very highly esteemed artist. This work bears witness to a recent phenomenon in the social history of art in our country: the mythification of the artist.
This interior, which is brimming with personality, is not yet another sample of pictorial conventionalism but rather the devout depiction of an artist’s sancta santorum. Here he is viewed not merely as a professional but as the almost demiurgic personage which painters had become since the triumph of enlightened academicist ideas.