Blast Furnaces in Bilbao

In his time Regoyos was, as is well-known, the Spanish painter most strongly committed to European Modernism. Indeed, his links with Spain were so slight during his early years that, on the long list of his exhibitions which started in Brussels in 1882, no name of any Spanish town or city appears until 1890, when he participated in that year’s Madrid General Fine Arts Exhibition. Even so, his appearances in Spanish exhibitions would always be fewer than those held in cities in other countries.

The smoke of industrial and technical progress (factories, railways) was often an element that Regoyos liked to paint in his pictures, as had already happened sporadically in the work of certain French Impressionists. Catalonian painter Marià Pidelaserra, with whose art that of Regoyos had so much in common, also started to paint industrial themes on her return from Paris in 1901. This tendency intensified in Regoyos after the start of the new century, and on some occasions (as in this view of the west bank of the Nervión estuary in Bilbao, which belonged to the Graells Collection - that was presumably Catalonian), industries, chimneys and smoke not only appeared in his pictures, but were the main feature.