Julia

Ramón Casas met Julia Peraire (1888–1941), a street lottery seller, at the Maison Dorée, one of the cafés in Barcelona's Plaza de Cataluña, around 1906. She was the artist's muse, lover, and companion until his death, and she was about 34 years old when she posed for this work.

A few years later, in 1922, she would marry the artist. Perhaps the ring she wears on her right hand, resting on her hip in a singular gesture to catch the observer's attention, refers to this union.

During the nearly thirty years they shared, Casas portrayed Julia on numerous occasions, making her his favorite model.

From the most seductive images showing Julia almost as a femme fatale to those closer to bourgeois portraits, these works demonstrate a constant evolution in the painter's gaze toward his always fascinating muse.

Through her attire and defiant attitude, Ramón Casas transforms Julia into one of the female myths of 20th-century French and Spanish plastic arts: the Carmen from Prosper Mérimée's novel (1845), popularized through Bizet's opera.

Dressed in a man's bullfighting jacket (torera) and vest over a low-cut chiffon or silk dress, and adorned with a comb and flowers in her hair, the figure exudes sensuality and self-assertion.

Compared to the early portraits of Julia, in which Casas highlights the model's sensuality and power of attraction, here he shows instead an image of an imposing and challenging woman, with a face of severe expression, a deep gaze, and an upright, rigid posture.

She becomes almost a mannequin that the painter characterizes as an insinuating Carmen through her clothing and pose, yet the sitter herself seems indifferent to her own seductive power.

Spanish themes were fashionable in late 19th-century Paris and had many followers among the Spanish artists who spent time in the city, such as Casas, who was particularly fond of traditional stereotypes.

These often manifested through his "chulas," women dressed in shawls with a confident attitude that brought the artist great fame. This portrait of Julia is likewise an excellent example of that French fascination with painting set within our folklore.

Through a varied repertoire of brushstrokes—some tight, short, and gestural, others long—the painter manages to capture the different physical aspects of the representation, such as the skin, the embroidery of the clothes, or the silky texture of the dress.

In the torera jacket and vest, the metallic reflections of the silver threads stand out. All these details reveal Ramón Casas as a technical virtuoso, with a fluency and subtlety of brushwork akin to that of his teacher Carolus-Duran or his admired Velázquez.

The painter uses a neutral background, blurred with colors that create an illusion of space and light, against which the half-length female figure stands out prominently.

This composition links back to the portrait tradition of Spanish Baroque painting, especially that of Diego Velázquez, which at the beginning of the 20th century was modernized by the pioneers of modernity, such as Ramón Casas.

Casas was an extraordinary colorist. Intense tones like this vermilion red, or shades full of nuance like the aquamarine blue of the dress, provide intensity and vivacity to his portraits, which were highly coveted by the Catalan bourgeoisie of his time, a class to which the artist himself belonged.