Hillsides of Montjuïc

Hillsides of Montjuïc of 1896 is an early landscape by Mir, painted when he was twenty-two and focused on one of Barcelona's most familiar topographic landmarks. Montjuïc, the hill overlooking the port, was a working landscape in the late nineteenth century — its slopes quarried, gardened, and marked by the fortifications that had dominated the city's history. For a young Barcelona painter it was a natural subject: accessible, visually complex, and carrying the weight of local identity. Mir painted the hillsides with the attention to direct outdoor observation that characterized progressive naturalist painting of the period in Catalonia. This work is now in the Fundación Banco Santander collection. The early date places it before Mir's visits to Mallorca and Tarragona that would transform his color sense; here we see him in the process of developing his eye for landscape under the influence of the naturalist tradition dominant in Catalan painting in the 1890s.

The rocky, vegetation-covered hillside reflects the tonal naturalism of Mir's academic training, with direct observation of outdoor light and shadow. The brushwork is more restrained than his later style, though his interest in the chromatic variation of sunlit landscape is already present.