The Jewel

The Jewel (c. 1907) dates from Mir's extraordinarily fertile period following his recovery from mental illness and extended time in the Tarragona countryside. The title suggests a jewel-like quality to the landscape itself — a pool, a garden patch, or a glimpse of natural color so concentrated it functions as an ornament. Mir's post-illness painting is distinguished by an almost hallucinatory chromatic intensity that contemporaries found both startling and original. His use of pure, unmixed color applied in broken strokes placed him in the company of the Fauves working simultaneously in France, though Mir arrived at his palette independently through lived experience. The MNAC's possession of this canvas testifies to its standing as a defining work of Spanish Post-Impressionism. Mir's paintings from this period influenced younger Catalan painters and remain among the most distinctive contributions to European painting of the early twentieth century.

The painting demonstrates Mir's characteristic method of building pictorial surfaces from discrete strokes of saturated, high-key color. His palette likely features jewel-toned greens, blues, and warm accents that vibrate optically against one another.