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Ramon Casas i Carbó (; 4 January 1866 – 29 February 1932) was a Catalan artist from Spain. Living through a turbulent time in the history of his native Barcelona, Catalonia, he was known as a portraitist, sketching and painting the intellectual, economic, and political elite of Barcelona, Paris, Madrid, and beyond. He was also known for his paintings of crowd scenes ranging from the audience at a bullfight to the assembly for an execution to rioters in the Barcelona streets (El garrot). Also a graphic designer, his posters and postcards helped to define the Catalan art movement known as modernisme.
The next few years he continued to paint and travel, spending most autumns and winters in Paris and the rest of the year in Spain, mostly in Barcelona but also in Madrid and Granada; his 1886 painting of the crowd at the Madrid bullfighting ring was to be the first of many highly detailed paintings of crowds. That year he survived tuberculosis, and convalesced for the winter in Barcelona. Among the artists he met in this period of his life, and who influenced him, were Laureano Barrau, Santiago Rusiñol, Eugène Carrière, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and Ignacio Zuloaga.
Casas and Rusiñol traveled through Catalonia in 1889, and collaborated on a short book Por Cataluña (desde mi carro), with text by Rusiñol and illustrations by Casas. Returning together to Paris, they lived together at the Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre, along with painter and art critic Miquel Utrillo and the sketch artist Ramon Canudas. Rusiñol chronicled these times in as series of articles "Desde el Molino" ("From the Mill") for La Vanguardia; again Casas illustrated. Casas became an associate of the Societé d'artistes françaises, allowing him to exhibit two works annually at their salon without having to pass through jury competition.
With Rusiñol and with sculptor Enric Clarasó he exhibited at Sala Parés in 1890; his work from this period, such as Plen Air and the Bal du Moulin de la Galette lies somewhere between an academic style and that of the French Impressionism. The style that would become known as modernisme had not yet fully come together, but the key people were beginning to know one another, and successful Spanish artists were increasingly coming to identify themselves with Barcelona as much as with Paris.
His fame continued to spread through Europe and beyond as he exhibited successfully in Madrid (1892, 1894), Berlin (1891, 1896) and at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893); meanwhile the bohemianism circle that included Casas and Rusiñol began with greater frequency to organize exhibitions of their own in Barcelona and Sitges. With this increasing activity in Spain, he settled more in Barcelona, but continued to travel to Paris for the annual Salons.
The bar hosted and revolving art exhibits, including one of the first one-man shows by Pablo Picasso; the most prominent piece in its permanent collection was a lighthearted Casas self-portrait, depicting him smoking a pipe while pedaling a tandem bicycle with Romeu as his stoker. The original of the painting—or most of it: nearly a third of the canvas was cut away by an intervening owner—is now in Barcelona's Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC); a creditable reproduction resides in the revived Els Quatre Gats.
Like Le Chat Noir, Els Quatre Gats attempted its own literary and artistic magazine, to which Casas was a major contributor. That was short-lived, but was soon followed by Pèl & Ploma, which would slightly outlast the bar itself, and Forma (1904–1908), to which Casas also contributed. Pèl & Ploma sponsored several prominent art exhibitions, including Casas' own well-received first solo show (1899 at Sala Parés), which brought together a retrospective of his oil paintings as well as a set of charcoal sketches of contemporary figures prominent in Barcelona's cultural life.
While his painting career continued successfully through this period, as part owner of a bar Casas engaged heavily in graphic design, adopting the Art Nouveau style that would come to define modernisme. He designed posters for the café, many of which depicted Romeu's gaunt visage. He also executed a series of advertisements for Codorniu, a brand of cava (or, as its ads of the time claimed, champagne) and anisette. Over the next decade, he would design poster ads for everything from Rolling paper to the Enciclopèdia Espasa.
In 1903 he became a full Societaire of the Salon du Champ de Mars in Paris, which would have allowed him to exhibit there annually, but in fact he only exhibited there for two more years. In 1903, his piece for the salon was one that had originally been called La Carga ( The Charge), which he retitled Barcelona 1902 in reference to a recent general strike, although in fact the painting, which shows Guardia Civil routing a crowd, had been executed at least two years before that strike. In 1904, the same piece won first prize at the General Exposition in Madrid.
During a 1904 sojourn in Madrid, he produced a series of sketches of the Madrid intelligentsia, and befriended painters Eliseu Meifrèn and Joaquín Sorolla, as well as Agustí Querol Subirats, official sculptor to the Spanish government. In Querol's studio, he executed an equestrian portrait of the king, Alfonso XIII, which was soon purchased by the United States collector Charles Deering, who, over the next few years would commission or purchase several of Casas paintings.
In 1908 Casas and his now-patron Deering traveled through Catalonia. Deering purchased a former hospital in Sitges to transform it into a sometime residence. Miquel Utrillo dubbed it Marycel. Later that year, Casas began a six-month journey to Cuba and the United States at Deering's invitation. During this time, he executed a dozen oil portraits and over thirty charcoal drawings of Deering's friends and associates.
Returning to Spain in April 1909, he put on solo shows in both Barcelona and Madrid. At the Fayanç Català gallery in Barcelona, he displayed 200 charcoal sketches, which he then donated to the Museu de Barcelona. His show in Madrid was at the Ministry of Tourism, and featured portraits of the city's leading figures, including the king.
His life continued in this vein for some time. In 1910 executed a painting of the funeral of his friend the art critic and novelist Raimon Casellas, who had committed suicide the previous year shortly after Barcelona's Setmana Tràgica and, for Deering, painted a second version of La Carga, this time with the prominent foreground figure of a Guardia Civil on foot rather than on horseback. Over the remaining years before World War I he traveled extensively in Spain and Europe, sometimes alone and sometimes with Deering, visiting Vienna, Budapest, Munich, Paris, the Netherlands, Madrid, and Galicia. He continued to have major exhibits in Spain and France. In 1913 he acquired an architecturally notable home in Barcelona, a tower on Carrer de Sant Gervasi (now Carrer de les Carolines) in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood; in 1915, he, Rusiñol, and Clarassó exhibited together in the Sala Parés, celebrating the 25th anniversary of their first joint exhibition there.
Casas, Rusiñol, and Clarasó resumed regular annual joint exhibitions at Sala Parés in 1921; these continued until Rusiñol's death in 1931. However, that year he had a falling out with his friend Utrillo over Maricel Casas's close association with Deering; the breach was never healed. In 1922, Casas finally married Júlia Peraire, and in 1924 she came along with him on a trip to the United States, during which he once again made portraits of the rich and famous.
By the 1920s, Casas had fallen far away from the avant garde tendencies of his youth. If anything, his work from this period looks like of an academic painter of an earlier time than his work of the 1890s. He continued to paint landscapes and portraits, as well as an anti-tuberculosis poster and others, but by the time of his death in 1932, shortly after the emergence of the Second Spanish Republic, he was already more a figure of the past.
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