Castilian Landscape

Castilian Landscape, painted in 1909 and held at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, exemplifies Zuloaga's program of treating the Spanish interior landscape as a moral and national subject. The Castilian meseta — the high central plateau of Spain, its towns bleached by sun, eroded by wind, punctuated by medieval towers and fortified churches — had become, through the writing of the Generation of 98, a kind of national icon. Unamuno's En torno al casticismo (1895) and Azorín's essays on Castile established the landscape as the repository of Spanish essence, stripped of Baroque ornament and Mediterranean sensuality. Zuloaga translated this literary program into visual terms: his Castilian paintings are arid, bone-hard, lit with a pitiless clarity that makes southern European sweetness seem irrelevant. This 1909 canvas belongs to the years when Zuloaga was at the peak of his international reputation, regularly exhibiting at the Venice Biennale and in Paris, where he had worked since the 1890s alongside Gauguin and the Post-Impressionist circle.

The palette restricts itself almost entirely to the geology: raw sienna, yellow ochre, burnt umber, with grey-green scrub vegetation and a luminous but unrelenting sky. Zuloaga builds the earth with heavy impasto, contrasting it against the thin, almost scumbled treatment of the sky. The compositional geometry is austere — few vertical accents, vast horizontal expanses.