page_title: Ramon Casas
section_title: Patronage and stardom
hierarchical_section_title: Ramon Casas / Patronage and stardom
caption_attribution_description: English: Ramon Casas i Carbó (1866–1932), Portrait of Charles Deering, 1914 from [1] This should be the relevant licence for an artist from Spain, where life + 70 is the law under the Berne Convention.
context_page_description: Ramón Casas i Carbó was a Spanish artist. Living through a turbulent time in the history of his native Barcelona, 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. Also a graphic designer, his posters and postcards helped to define the Catalan art movement known as modernisme.
context_section_description: Casas' mother purchased the monastery of Sant Benet de Bages in 1907 and hired Puig i Cadafalch to restore it. Casas would spend much time there, and would repeatedly depict the monastery and its surroundings. Five years later, when his mother died, he inherited the monastery.
  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 a 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 Museo 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 Raimón Casellas, who had committed suicide the previous year shortly after Barcelona's semana trágica 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 San 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.
caption: Casas portrait of Charles Deering, c. 1914
exif: {"Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "44", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5950"}