Title: On the Banks of the Guadaíra with a boat
Artist: Sánchez-Perrier, Emilio
Chronology: Circa 1890
Technique: Oil on panel

The scene is set in the light of the Andalusian noonday sun. A peasant couple have steered a rowing boat onto a sand bank where the blue water of the River Guadaíra runs calm and sparkling as it is slowed by the sand.

The riverside is fringed with thick vegetation of tamarisk, bramble and willow and sprinkled with poplars bearing new leaves that adorn the fine springtime sky. In the distance, rocky areas and shrubs are visible on the hills.

Full of sagacious pictorial options and visual delicacy, there is something of the photograph about this painting which belies a manner beyond the real of analysing objectivity by incorporating a diaphanous execution of what perception itself assimilates and discerns. Here Sánchez-Perrier is confirmed as a fully-fledged modern painter concerned with understanding and feeling an objectivity rooted in positivism and, at the same time, its pictorial transcription, contained in the unitary, harmonious whole of the composition.

Certain features of the execution and compositional design suggest a study of Dutch historical landscape painting in addition to an assimilation of the general character of the kind of landscape painting that developed during the predominance of the academic naturalism of the Paris Salons, where this painter regularly submitted his work.

Source: Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga