Cabaret Singer

Cabaret Singer of 1897 dates from early in Nonell's career, when he was in his early twenties and active in the vibrant bohemian culture of Barcelona's Paral·lel entertainment district and the Els Quatre Gats café circle. This was the Barcelona of Picasso's youth, a city of working-class cabarets, music halls, and popular entertainment that modernist painters began to treat as legitimate subject matter. Nonell's cabaret singer places him in the tradition of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, both of whom had made the world of café-concert performance central to their art. The sitter's theatrical context — stage lighting, costume, the artifice of performance — gave painters opportunities to explore unconventional illumination and psychological states caught between public persona and private person. Now in the Fundación Banco Santander collection, this work demonstrates the range of Nonell's early subject matter before he narrowed his focus to Roma women after 1902.

The influence of Toulouse-Lautrec is perceptible in the use of strong silhouette and theatrical artificial lighting. The oil technique in this early work is somewhat tighter than Nonell's later looseness, but already shows his interest in capturing mood over descriptive detail.