Landscape with a Village on the Outskirts of Rome

The present canvas is highly characteristic of Barbasán’s style and subject matter. Throughout his career this Aragonese painter focused primarily on painting views of rural villages on the outskirts of Rome. All are executed with particular care in the accurate description of the buildings and vegetation, which Barbasán reproduced with exquisite detail and draughtsmanship while animating his scenes with figures and creating a bucolic, picturesque mood. His particular focus in this work is a river running through a village in the Roman Campagna with women hanging out the washing in a wooden enclosure.

The bright, luminous palette that almost suggests watercolour, the clear arrangement of the different elements of the composition and the detailed, descriptive handling are all elements common to the Italian landscape tradition of the late 19th century in which Barbasán trained. This style, which was deployed at this date by other Spanish landscape painters who had trained in Italy, continued to look back to Fortuny’s achievements of some decades earlier.