Isidre Nonell

Isidre Nonell was a Post-Impressionist and early Modernist painter known for painting Catalan’s socially marginalized with innovative paint handling. He was strongly influenced by both the Impressionists and their stylistic counterparts, the Pointillists. He used thick layers of paint, sketchy brushstrokes, and a variety of colors in his figurative paintings. His works rarely include backgrounds or narrative context for his figures, but they nonetheless evoke emotion and tragedy. While his paintings show Nonell’s deep sympathy for his subjects, he supported himself as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines, creating less pitiful caricatures with a looser style, more akin to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.