José Mongrell Torrent 1870-1937

Among all the followers of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida’s luminism, the painter José Mongrell Torrent is often considered the closest to him in pictorial style. Born in Valencia, like his illustrious master, he trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos, where in 1885 he joined the studios of Ignacio Pinazo Camarlench and Francisco Domingo Marqués. After beginning as a portraitist, he gradually turned to landscape and then genre painting. Naturalistic in his subjects, he was particularly committed to depicting the harsh, daily realities of peasants, fishermen, and laborers. Participating from 1890 in the Nacional, the Madrid Fine Arts Exhibition, his painting “El mortet” (“The Mortar”) was praised by critics in 1893. The following year, his portraits earned acclaim at the Exhibition of the Circle of Fine Arts in Valencia.

Encouraged by these early successes, Mongrell moved to Madrid from 1899 to 1906, where he became a pupil of Sorolla and, in that capacity, participated in the 1901 Nacional. He quickly adopted from his master a livelier, more modern brushwork and a particular attention to the treatment of light, exploring a wide range of chromatic nuances. In the capital, the young painter also frequented the intellectual circle of the Café de Levante, where he met Valle-Inclán and Pío Baroja. From 1906, he established his studio in Cullera, a Mediterranean seaside town just south of Valencia, where he pursued increasingly luminous painting, producing landscapes, seascapes, and scenes combining fishermen and bathers. At the same time, Mongrell participated in the prestigious International Exhibitions of Barcelona, receiving medals in 1907 and 1911. He finally settled permanently in Barcelona in 1913 when he obtained the chair of drawing at the School of Fine Arts and Industrial Arts. Highly regarded, his teaching left a lasting impact on the next generation of painters, including Rigoberto Soler of Alcoy and Luis Fernández.

Striking for its emotionally charged subject, our oil on canvas belongs to Mongrell’s Madrid period, when he was studying under Sorolla. The artist depicts a young mother, perhaps his wife Josefina López, whom he married in 1901, giving a spoonful of medicine to her sick child. Through a sophisticated play of light and shadow, Mongrell demonstrates his individuality by applying his master’s modern brushwork to a more intimate, shadowed scene. Against the subdued blue, gray, and mauve tones of the room, the painter introduces vivid orange and green highlights at the center of the composition, emphasizing the spoon and cup of medicine given to the convalescent. The profiles of the child and his mother, who faces him, appear in synthetic shadows, backlit by the strong lamp on the bedside table. This unusual light source casts subtle orange reflections on the bedcover in the foreground.

In its composition, this painting directly recalls another contemporary work by Mongrell, Sin remedio (fig. 1), which won a third-class medal at the 1904 Nacional (cat. no. 910). However, here death does not have the final word. By deliberately emphasizing a mother’s tenderness toward her child, this painting symbolically responds to suffering as an ode to hope.