Dolors

Isidre Nonell painted Dolors in 1910, the final year of his short life, and it exemplifies the mature direction he had pursued since his return to Barcelona from Paris around 1900. Nonell had spent time in Montmartre in the late 1890s alongside Picasso and the circle associated with the journal Pèl i Ploma, absorbing the dark social palette of Steinlen and the expressive distortion of Toulouse-Lautrec. Back in the Raval district of Barcelona, he devoted himself almost entirely to painting the gitanas — the Romani women who lived on the margins of the city — as a sustained act of witness to lives invisible to bourgeois Catalan society. 'Dolors' is both a personal name and the Catalan word for sorrows or pains, a double meaning Nonell would have consciously exploited. His models were women he knew from the Raval neighbourhood, and he returned to the same faces across hundreds of canvases, individualising figures that official culture wished to treat as an anonymous mass. By 1910 his handling had become looser and more gestural while his tonal range darkened further, the figures emerging from earthy grounds with an intensity that critics at the time found unsettling. He died in February 1911 at thirty-six, leaving Dolors among his last completed works.

Nonell builds the figure from dense, overlapping strokes of earth tones — ochres, raw umbers, and charcoal greys — with the face emerging as a focal light. The background is thinly worked, almost raw canvas in places, concentrating attention on the sitter's expression. Contours dissolve into the ground rather than being drawn, creating a sense of the figure weighted by circumstance.