The Seafront, Sant Feliu de Guíxsols

The town of Sant Feliu de Guíxols, birth-place of Amat’s wife, provided the subject matter for numerous works by this Catalan artist. Amat was a painter of urban scenes who primarily focused on the city and the life of its inhabitants. Over the course of his career he remained faithful to these themes, and his repetition of motifs and subjects became a characteristic of his output. Amat’s particular approach to cities and their inhabitants is devoid of pomposity and presents reality in a clear, direct manner. Critics of the day described him as an Impressionist painter, which is fundamentally true although he in fact comes closer to being a plein-air painter, as the art historian Francesc Fontbona has rightly noted: an artist who used the sketchy handling characteristic of this type of painting to imbue his compositions with an impression of spontaneity and the near-at-hand. In the case of this depiction of the seafront at Sant Feliu, the sea functions as a pretext for a depiction of the passers-by, who constitute the element that most interested the artist. The Mediterranean light is expressed with the joyful, Luminist chromatic range that is to be found in many of his works that depict the town of Sant Feliu.