Dolores

Dolores of 1903, in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, bears a title that is simultaneously a personal name and the Spanish word for sorrow or pain — an ambiguity that seems entirely deliberate in Nonell's art. The MNAC holds the most concentrated collection of Nonell's Roma portraits, preserving the core of an oeuvre that was controversial in Barcelona during his lifetime for its insistence on representing social marginalisation rather than the aspirational imagery that Modernista Catalan culture preferred. Dolores's name-as-condition gives the painting allegorical weight without removing it from the specific observation of an actual woman — the subject's individuality and her representative status coexist without tension in Nonell's best work.

The figure is rendered in Nonell's characteristic palette of warm earth tones and dark passages, the face emerging from the surrounding dark paint with a quality of internal light rather than external illumination. The brushwork in the face is more deliberate than in the surrounding clothing and background, establishing the specific physiognomy of the individual sitter as the painting's primary concern.