Portrait in the mirror, París

In the interior of a half-lit room, we see the image of a young gentleman reflected in a wall mirror that hangs above a table on which several dressing table objects are laid out beside an earthenware jar filled with paintbrushes. There are several papers and a picture attached to the frame. Apart from being one of the most suggestive “interior portraits” of the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, this canvas is something of an enigma, and it is a mysterious painting, because of its composition and because of its history. All of this helps to make, if that were possible, its splendid pictorial quality and irresistible formal beauty even more attractive.

Indeed, this painting first came onto the American market under the title Autoportrait dans l’atelier and it was presented as an exclusive work of Ramón Casas because of the Catalan master’s signature which appears clearly on the ticket pinned to the mirror, while the painted inscription in one of the corners was interpreted as a simple dedication.

However, from the start, a simple comparison of the physical features of the person reflected in the mirror with the known features of the extremely young Casas in those years seemed to raise doubts about this identification, even though the pose of the model, standing before the mirror turned slightly to his left, and with half of his face hidden by the shadow of the room, seemed to indicate that this was indeed an image of a painter copying his own reflected image.

When the painting came into the Collection of Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, a thorough analysis was carried out of its visual language and of the inscription in particular, and this helped to unveil the person’s true identity, making its interpretation even more interesting and enriching.

In the lower right-hand corner, there is a dedication “à mon ami Foret”, to the French painter, Maurice Lobre, a close friend of Casas. The Catalan painter had met Lobre during his first visit to Paris a few months before 1882, the year that he signed this work. Indeed, Lobre, who was 21 years old at the time, was one of Casas’ closest friends and a classmate of his during his stay in the French capital, and they would eventually paint portraits of each other. Casas painted a full-body charcoal portrait of his friend several years later, and notwithstanding the logical changes that his facial features had undergone (by then in his forties and sporting a full beard), there is no questioning the fact that the person with the wizened face and its sharp and angular features in that painting is the same person as the one who appears in the mirror in this picture, and who therefore, can be none other than Lobre.

The key to the ensuing enigma of all this unravelling lies in determining the true authorship of the painting. This was a particularly difficult task in this case given the stylistic similarity of both painters, who had been trained after all in the exact same aesthetic outlook. However, this would not have raised any problems if it hadn’t been for the presence of Casas’ characteristic signature in a very prominent place on the canvas —highlighted on a white ticket on Lobre’s body, next to his heart to be precise. This placement cannot have been by chance or without good reason, and accordingly it does not seem to be a simple signed paper or a randomly-placed calling card, as one might have initially thought, but rather and more probably, it is proof of the young Catalan painter’s participation in the canvas, in a typical “two-artist painting”, which was quite common among painter friends; years later Casas himself would return to this formula, leaving proof of it in the very interesting picture entitled Retratándose (Painting Ourselves or Painting Portraits of Each Other), painted and also jointly signed by the painter and his great friend Rusiñol.

However, Casas’ youth and his limited experience during the first few months of his stay in Paris would suggest, in any case, that his intervention in the canvas was a rather timid one, focussed especially on the objects, in which we seem to see the assuredness of the direct and vibrant strokes that would become a characteristic of the Catalan artist’s mature work, extracting very subtle nuances from the illumination of the different elements placed on the table, as well as from the kerosene lamp, which is the absolute protagonist of the foreground of the composition.

Bearing all of this in mind, the painting bears splendid testimony to the most characteristic style of Lobre’s painting in those years. The Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection has another magnificent example from this period in a recently-acquired painting by Lobre entitled the The bathroom of Émile Blanche. Both paintings reflect Lobre’s fundamental interest in painting interiors, and these are almost always bathed in a soft shadow and based on spatial games in which half-open doors, the glass of the windows or the opaque glint of the mirrors offer a sense of suggested spaces, indirect sources of light and absorbing and silent atmospheres. These are rooms crammed with furniture and ornaments that ooze a sense of absolute privacy disrupted by the brush that paints them and by the viewer who contemplates them, in which the objects appear, as if suspended in time, in a silent calm, broken only by the bright sparkle of glass and metal. This pictorial language —which in Lobre’s late work gradually does away with the outlines, moving towards aesthetic outlooks close to those of the fauvists— must have made a strong impression on the young Casas during this first Parisian experience. From then on, he would attach a very special importance to the painting of interiors that were almost always filled with figures or used as settings for his portraits.

Besides all this, this painting, which was practically unknown until its recent sale, represents a very singular and interesting contribution to an analysis of the self-portrait genre within the European scene of its time. However, if we look beyond its iconographic connotations, the painting is essentially a magnificent still life in which Lobre’s concern for spatial games is patently clear, and it obliges the viewer to look through a succession of planes and to sidestep the kerosene lamp situated in the immediate foreground before reaching the back of the wall reflected in the mirror, which in turn unveils an invisible space, situated figuratively to the back of the viewer. In what would become a hallmark of the work of both Lobre and Casas, the light bathing the shadow of the room comes from an invisible large window, and it is the key player of the painting, drawing sparkle and nuances of colour of an extraordinary pictorial lushness from the various objects in the room, whose shapes and shimmer duplicate the mercury glass of the mirror, immediately evoking some of the compositional formulas used by the great Impressionist masters.

The use of the mirror, which had obviously been an essential tool for pictorial self-portraits before the invention of photography, continued nonetheless to hold a particular attraction for painters in the late 19^th century. They used it as a vehicle to show the illusory presence of the actual image in real spaces. As in this case, this is a knowing wink that momentarily turns the viewer who is looking at the painting into the actual painter of the work, thereby returning to an optical resource of essentially Baroque effects.

Bearing in mind the story behind the canvas, the friend to whom it is dedicated might well be the discrete Parisian still-life painter Paul Foret, who was almost certainly part of Lobre’s circle of friends around the time that Casas arrived in Paris.

José Luis Díez