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| Josep Mestres Cabanes is an indisputable case of a vocation for painting, sharpened by the family presence of painters, decorators and stage designers. He painted many oils and watercolours and exhibited his paintings in Madrid and Barcelona. Mestres’ paintings of this kind are generally little known. Anyone hearing of Mestres Cabanes immediately imagines Burgos Cathedral or an interior at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, but it requires a great effort of memory to mention any others. However, his work was very extensive and varied. Initially Mestres Cabanes had little free time and his work, first in Corrons’ studio and then in Alarma’s – where he worked more hours than normal and even weekends and public holidays – was generally decorative and theatrical. But, as he was very keen, it was not a great effort for him to spend hours in his breaks painting watercolours of nature. From here came Mestres’ watercolour series on Barcelona: its monuments, the Gothic quarter, the Cathedral, the squares, the courtyards, many hidden corners, the Rambla, the port, the sea, ships, Sant Pau del Camp, Sant Pere de les Puel·les, the Circ Barcelonès Theatre and Paral·lel, Montjuïc, etc. and later his creations inside the Palau de la Música, the Scala restaurant, etc. As a romantic nature lover, trees – his typical fir trees – have gone down in the pages of art history, but he also liked cypresses, pines, mountains and – to a lesser degree – the sea, either calm or stirred up by a storm. As a lover of everyday life, Mestres liked anything that drew his attention: ordinary scenes, what was happening in front of him when he went into the street. Apart from Catalonia in general, and Barcelona in particular, Mestres Cabanes painted urban landscapes in Madrid (the Royal Palace, Goya’s tomb, Plaza de Oriente, among others), León (the Cathedral and the collegiate church of San Isidoro), Santiago de Compostela, Toledo, Piedra Monastery in Alhama de Aragon and, abroad, Paris, Venice, Rome and Egypt. Mestres Cabanes painted for the mere pleasure he felt doing it and, because of this, he never took much care in organising exhibitions or finding a dealer to represent him. He even found it difficult to let go of his works, he had put so much feeling into creating them. Each of them was studied in detail and worked on as carefully as possible. Before organising an exhibition, he sketched a large number of notes in luxurious detail – sketches which, in this state, constitute true works of art. Mestres had worked a great deal in watercolour before painting oils. In general, he was a good critic of his own works and he never wanted to paint anything he would not be satisfied with afterwards. He felt admiration for the work of Mir and Fortuny and he was convinced that surprising results could be achieved by bringing together the colourism of the former and the precision of the latter. The problem of light always concerned Mestres a great deal. In the field of paintings he was extraordinarily interested in putting down the effect of light at different times of the day. Mestres maintained that every day and every time has its own, unrepeatable light and that was what he was trying to reflect in his oils and watercolours. His painting is conservative, traditional, rigorously real and detailist at a time when these were rare concerns. But, in his dead bird, in his fir trees at Ordesa, in his landscapes of Pedraforca and in his watercolours of Sitges, the sensitivity of an artist who was incapable of painting anything that did not motivate him shines through. |
Painting from the view from Barcelona from Liceu's terrace (1944).
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