casas and deering --7/31/26

31 Jul 2026

casas and deering --7/31/26

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Today's selection-- from Charles Deering & Ramon Casas by Isabel Coll Mirabent. Ramon Casas i Carbó was the magnificent artist from Barcelona who lived from 1866 to 1932. His portraits and crowd scenes helped define the modernisme art movement. His key benefactor was the American businessman Charles Deering.

"Throughout his artistic career, Ramón Casas stood out as a master of painting as well as drawing, and he has been judged, both in his time and ours, an exceptionally gifted artist with an incisive personality. In his drawings, he tried to find the technical means and artistic methods that would give the best possible expression to his ideas. He employed his ability and mastery of different techniques, for example, using different types of pen and pencil, alone or complemented by gouache or watercolor. In some drawings, colors play a predominant role, and the resulting works demonstrate that Casas was a great harmonist, an artist of exceptional sensitivity.

“Casas combined his facility for drawing with a sense for capturing the most simple and fugitive instants of life, as though he were a reporter working in a visual medium. Some drawings were done from life, although the majority of them were from memory, capturing a recent experience. In the privacy of his home or studio, he was able to give expression to the imaginary or to draw a reality that he rendered with an ironic touch. In either case, Casas produced compositions employing distinct techniques–all characterized by a confidence and force of line and forming an oeuvre that is indisputably modern, free, and personal.

“Among the oldest drawings by Ramón Casas in the Deering collection is one of a traditional procession in Barcelona, featuring the so-called giants, characters who presided over these folk ceremonies. Knowing the tastes of Charles Deering, who was always interested in the customs, traditions, and events peculiar to a country, we may assume that this sketch would have enchanted him. A series of drawings done in Paris in 1891 was also part of Deering's collection. They narrate moments from Casas's stay in Montmartre, along with his friend and fellow painter

Self-portrait, 1908

Santiago Rusiñol. It is possible that Casas gave them to Deering during the first years of their friendship, when Deering purchased some of the works Casas had painted in Paris. Perhaps the painter had told his new friend about his bohemian life in Montmartre, experiences that Casas thought Deering might better understand by way of his drawings. These drawings were cut out of letters the painter had sent to his friends and family and served as a magnificent illustrative complement to the texts themselves.

“In these drawings from the Paris series, in addition to some self-portraits that include his friend Rusiñol, Casas also included representations of people who for some reason had surprised him. These are works of a modern spirit, free of any shackles, that have in common a mix of realism and good humor. They stand out for the frankness of their execution, for the particular grace that characterizes this blend of rapid spontaneity, in which a few lines serve perfectly to capture and fix the structure of the subject, so we know the interior life of the person being portrayed. Casas generally used a pen for drawing, a medium that allows him an incisive line, quite distinct from the softer lines of pencil and brush. The world that he describes through these drawings is shown with a realism filled with humor and tenderness.

“The other groups of drawings held by the Deering Library reflect the shared experiences of Casas and Deering, in their travels around Europe, during their stays in Sitges, and during the painter's stay in America. The variety of the portraits that Casas did of Deering reveals how much the painter enjoyed having his American friend as a model, whom he turned into the protagonist of his humorous visions. The drawings constitute a set of an incomparable richness, full of grace and elegance in their outline. They are intimate portraits in which Casas attempts to bring to light a wide variety of expressions, always entertaining, with a slight satirical aspect to them.

“Like the good observer he was, his drawings serve to document the moments he shared with his American friend. Many are drawn on the stationery he found in the hotel rooms where he stayed. A quick look at them gives us an understanding of Casas's personality and worth, but also an appreciation of the ties of friendship that existed between the men. In these scenes, the artist excels in capturing the essence of the occasion and never fails to translate either the external movement or the internal feelings of their protagonist. These drawings are extremely original works, both for the topics they illustrate and for the techniques they employ.

“In 1909, on the invitation of Charles Deering, Casas traveled to America. This long journey resulted in drawings in which he used a great variety of techniques. The American drawings

are the prelude to ones he would produce later, on the trips that the two friends would take around Europe. Some of them have a markedly jocular spirit, like the one that shows Deering seated playing music on the guitar, to which two crocodiles are dancing, or the one in which he is dressed as a maja, inspired by Casas's portrait of Virginia Bacon. An example of admirable simplicity is Casas's self-portrait, sketched on the stationery of a hotel in Pasadena. And there is also a drawing of Roger Deering, done as the basis for an oil portrait.”