The gypsy woman

The Gypsy Woman of 1902, at the Abelló Museum in Mollet del Vallès near Barcelona, is among the earliest of Nonell's sustained explorations of the Roma women of Barcelona's El Raval neighbourhood as his primary subject. Isidre Nonell, a Catalan painter who absorbed the lessons of Post-Impressionism in Paris, returned to Barcelona and turned his attention to the marginalised Roma populations of the city's oldest barrio with an intensity that distinguished his work from the prevailing currents of his artistic generation. The gypsy women — huddled, often mute with endurance, occasionally meeting the viewer's eye with guarded directness — gave Nonell a subject of social marginalisation that he painted with formal seriousness rather than picturesque exoticism.

Nonell's early Roma paintings use a dark earthy palette dominated by deep ochres, warm browns, and muted greens — colours that place the figures firmly in the physical reality of poverty rather than the chromatic festivity of romantic gypsy imagery. The paint application is loose and economical, achieving the character of the sitters through broadly applied marks that emphasise expression over detailed description.