Landscape near Hernani

Hernani is a Basque town south of San Sebastián whose dramatic river valley and intensely green hills gave Regoyos some of his most characteristic landscape material in the years around 1900. The Basque Country, with its persistent mist and pre-industrial village character, presented very different challenges from the hard Mediterranean light that dominated Spanish landscape painting as known internationally. Regoyos's landscapes near Hernani show him grappling with how to apply Neo-Impressionist technique — developed in the flat northern light of Belgium and France — to a landscape where atmosphere and moisture shift rapidly and dramatically throughout the day. The Carmen Thyssen collection holds this as one of several Basque landscape views by the artist.

The landscape is built with an even distribution of broken color across sky, hillside, and valley floor, with no single element allowed to dominate the surface. Regoyos's greens range from acid yellow-green to deep blue-green within the same hillside, creating the shimmer of living foliage in humid Atlantic light.