Darío de Regoyos

Darío de Regoyos (1857–1913) was a Spanish Post-Impressionist painter born in Gijón who spent much of his career in Belgium and France before returning to Spain. He studied at the Madrid School of Fine Arts before travelling to Belgium in 1879, where he became friendly with James Ensor, Émile Verhaeren, and the Belgian avant-garde group Les XX, which he joined as a founder member when it was established in 1884. His time in Belgium exposed him to the latest developments in French and Belgian progressive painting—Impressionism, Symbolism, pointillist experiments—which he absorbed and transformed into a distinctive personal language. His Spanish subjects—the Good Friday processions in Castile and Orduña, the Basque landscapes near Hernani and San Sebastián, the railway lines at Pancorbo—are painted with a pointillist-influenced broken touch and an atmospheric sensitivity that places him among the most important Spanish modernists. The Good Friday paintings, with their sinister processions of penitents moving through dark streets, combine social observation with a hallucinatory quality. His landscape of the Santoña Bay downpour and the train passing through Pancorbo show his ability to render changing weather and light with Impressionist freshness.

Regoyos combines a pointillist broken touch—absorbed from his Belgian years and contact with Seurat's circle—with a very Spanish sensibility for dramatic contrasts of light and dark, festive colour, and the melancholy of Castilian landscape. His Good Friday scenes use dark, expressive colour and tightly grouped figures to create an almost Goya-like quality of foreboding. His Basque landscapes are fresher, using broken colour and atmospheric haze to capture the greens and blues of the Atlantic coast.

Regoyos is one of the most important Spanish Post-Impressionist painters and a key figure in the circulation of Belgian and French avant-garde ideas into Spain. His founding membership of Les XX placed him at the heart of the European progressive art network, and his Spanish subjects are among the most original works produced in Spain between Goya and Picasso.