Study of Mme. Chauchat

The title alludes to the protagonist of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, a novel Verdaguer translated into Catalan in 1927. The work perfectly matches the literary description: enigmatic, distant, magnetic, with an almost unreal presence and a certain emotional reserve. This piece reveals the profound dialogue between the artist's two sides—the writer-translator and the painter—as Verdaguer internalizes a literary character and reinterprets her visually. He does not aim for a physical portrait, but rather a psychological one. The result is a timeless, evocative, and profoundly silent image that reveals his ability to elevate a literary motif to a purely pictorial emotional state. The palette is limited: earthy reds, browns, blacks, and a white outline on the neck and wrist as the only points of light, lending the portrait a sober and restrained character. The compact and dense application of color departs from the typical Japanese influence of that period and aligns it with a modern classicism with expressionist echoes, but without formal exaggerations. The simplification of the face and the overall solidity link it to European trends of the 1930s, focused on volume and inner tension. The scene, devoid of background and context, focuses attention on the psychology of the figure and creates an introspective atmosphere.