Sierra Nevada

For Regoyos, as for several painters of his time or somewhat earlier (Fortuny, Moragas, Martín Rico, Rusiñol, Casas, Utrillo, Barrau, Mas i Fondevila, Cecilio Pla, Pichot and Sorolla), Granada was an almost magical place, which exerted a pronounced magnetism on artists and writers and was thus a positive pole of attraction.

Regoyos was in the city on more than one occasion, and even lived in it for some periods towards the end of his life. The date of the painting could thus have been during this final time; several magnificent pictures of Granada by the painter were done in 1910 and 1911. However, this oil painting, a typical example of the peculiar primitivism that often characterised the artist and which shows the bridge of the Angustias over the river Genil, was judged by Juan San Nicolás to have been created in 1905, thus ruling out the date of 1912 that had previously been attributed to it.

The first owner of the work was Flemish painter Théo Van Rysselberghe, the standard-bearer of Neo-Impressionism in Belgium and an intimate friend of Regoyos. The Asturian painter said he had taken up Neo-Impressionism, a style of which he was at one point an excellent exponent, precisely “pour embêter Théo” (“to annoy Théo”). The fact that the painting was in the hands of this great friend from the beginning was conducive to the work being taken to the exhibitions in posthumous tribute to Regoyos, which took place successively in Brussels and Paris in 1914.