The humble

The wooden work, later used as a new model, is a replica of a previous plaster original, whose whereabouts are unknown today, although most likely destroyed.

As far as we know, it is the only wooden sculpture that Gargallo made.

As we already indicated for The Beast of Man, 1904, all the plaster reliefs that made up the set on the capital virtues and sins (main protagonists of Gargallo's first individual exhibition, held in Barcelona in 1906) were probably destroyed in the 1900s. the 1920s, with photographic documentation of only four of them preserved, including this one.

Even though there are also abundant differentiating nuances, the relationships are evident, logical on the other hand if we consider the dates of completion and the respective themes, between these reliefs and those dedicated to the Corporal Works of Mercy, which Gargallo executed in 1906-11 for the staircase of the Administration Pavilion of the Hospital de la Santa Cruz y San Pablo, in Barcelona, ​​under the orders of the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner.