Ávila

A traveler across Spain and Europe and a lover of excursions, Aureliano de Beruete spent part of the summer of 1909 in Ávila. In a letter sent to his friend Joaquín Sorolla, he explained:

The parched field, of straw-like yellows shining brightly under the sun, displays the full mastery of an artist in his creative prime. He uses short, agile, nervous, and blurred brushstrokes in which colors blend, seeking to capture the reflections of light.

These are examples of the very personal and experimental assimilation that Beruete made of the pictorial resources of Impressionism.

If short brushstrokes dominate the foreground of the painting, in the distance, the light slides over the grain fields and the road. To paint this, the artist uses long, flat, and thick strokes, capturing the mirror effect and the heat shimmer of the sun that blurs the outlines.

On this side of the painting, the view loses itself in the horizon of the Castilian fields. Behind the hermitage of Santa María de la Cabeza—the chapel of the old cemetery—and the city wall, the fields stretch toward some nearby mountains.

In a painting dominated by the arid Castilian landscape, the architecture and the mountains serve as complements, yet they awaken the viewer's curiosity given the visual richness of a work so full of light.

In front of the wall, we see part of the buildings outside the city limits, with white walls and red roofs that blur due to the distance and the intensity of the light. Just a few strokes with plenty of paint, sometimes applied directly from the tube, give shape to the houses.

From our vantage point on a small hill facing the city, we cannot clearly distinguish the details, and that is exactly the effect the painter achieves. As we look closer within the painting, we see that our eyes have reconstructed the accumulation of imprecise brushstrokes.

We are looking at the northern wall of Ávila, a medieval defensive structure that began construction in the 11th century. Between colored lights and shadows, Beruete briefly outlines the shapes of its walls and its identifying "cubos" or cylindrical towers.

Situated slightly above the middle of the canvas, it is not, however, a visual barrier. Our gaze crosses the fields toward it but invites us to continue toward the buildings rising above it and toward the mountain range in the background.

Inside the walls, we see the silhouette of Ávila Cathedral with its straight-topped tower, a building whose construction spanned from the 12th to the 16th century.

The sun reflects strongly on the towers of the wall in front of the church, which remains merely hinted at in its forms, already deep in the background of the painting.

Almost blending into the landscape, a pair of travelers has stopped for a moment by the roadside. Their silhouettes are barely a few brushstrokes and some thick impasto that reflect the inclement August sun on their headwear and on the esparto pannier carried by the donkey.

Following the road to the left, the view leads us to the Romanesque church of San Vicente, located outside the walls. We see some poplars, a small patch of green, and, in front of the temple, some barely hinted-at houses.

The trees are just four or five green brushstrokes, and the buildings, merging into one another, dissolve into a tangled puzzle of color dabs when we look closely.

The sky is undoubtedly one of the protagonists of the painting. With light brushstrokes and some thicker touches, he captures very truthfully the effect of a hot day, where the sky is covered by a whitish veil due to the intense luminosity reflected from the earth.

This atmospheric and luminous painting is the result of working en plein air, just as his master Carlos de Haes had taught Beruete landscape painting should be done. Based on those teachings, Beruete would explore a version of Impressionism filtered through the light of Castile.