Hermenegildo Anglada-Camarasa, Barcelona 1871-Pollensa 1959

Alberto López Buchardo
Adan C. Diehl, Buenos Aires (acquired from the above, 1911)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Toledo (bequeathed from the above, 1931)

Buenos Aires, Salón Witcomb, 1915, as La gatita rosa
Buenos Aires, Sala Parmenio Piñero del Museo
Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1916, no. 8 (entitled El descanso, La gata rosa)
Barcelona, Paulau Nacional: Exposició Internacional de Belles Arts, 1929-30
London, Leicester Galleries, 1930, no. 14
Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, 58th Autumn Exhibition, 1930, no. 246
Probably Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, 29 Annual International Exhibition of Paintings, 1930
Chicago, Art Institute, Foreign Section of the Carnegie International Exhibition of Paintings, 1931
Providence, Rhode Island School of Design, Modern Spanish Paintings, 1934, no. 2

La Prensa, Buenos Aires, 1916, catalogued and illustrated
S. Hutchinson Harris, 'Hermenegildo Anglada-Camarasa', The Studio, London, 15 January 1926, pp. 3-10, discussed and illustrated
'Una exposició d’obres d’Anglada-Camarasa a Londres', Catalunya, Buenos Aires, 1932, mentioned
Blake-More Godwin, Catalogue of European Paintings, The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, 1939, pp. 34-5, catalogued and illustrated (as On the Sofa)
Tito Cittadini, Los que pintaron en Mallorca: Hermen Anglada-Camarasa, ‘Revista’, año IV, January-June 1947, mentioned
Francesc Fontbona and Francesc Miralles, Anglada-Camarasa: catalogue raisonée, Barcelona, 1981, pp. 64 and 120, mentioned; p. 262, C14, catalogued and illustrated; pp. 100-01, illustrated in colour over a double page; illustrated in colour on the dust jacket

Commissioned by Alberto López Buchardo, an artist and one of Anglada's pupils, and painted circa 1911-1916, the present work ranks as one of the artist's most iconic motifs. Reclining on a sofa, the sitter looks engagingly at the viewer, confident and unselfconscious, locking him into her gaze. La Gata rosa was executed at a key juncture in Anglada's artistic development. The girl's piercing gaze harks back to the intense expressions of the figures in his nocturnal scenes of the Parisian demi monde which had dominated his work after moving to the French capital in 1897, while the palette and technique anticipate the more freely painted, luminous landscapes painted after Anglada's return to Spain in 1914. 

The striking effects of Anglada's textural and chromatic experimentation at this point in his career are clearly apparent in La Gata rosa. While colour is still his primary concern, in the present work he has moved away from the fine glazes of his early work, instead applying the paint with bravura directly on to the canvas from the tube. The picture is as much a harmony of colours, forms, and materials, as it is a portrait in the conventional sense. Pink (as a derivative of red) and green are complimentary colours, the chromatic ensemble fused together by the printed patterns on the dress and the sofa. Anglada was fascinated by firework displays and the iridescent patterns they described against the canvas of the night sky, and in a more abstract sense the present work reads like such an explosion of light and colour, the radiating white patterns on the sofa and the whisps of white on the wallpaper adding to the effect. The meandering lines of the sofa back and the girl's dress create rhythmic patterns across the picture surface that can be found almost unaltered in his landscape pictures of a few years later.     

Like Sorolla, Anglada developed a huge international following during his own lifetime, especially in America. Following a highly successful exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1924, the artist selected nine of his works for an exhibition that travelled to Washington, New York, Chicago, Des Moines, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In 1924 he successfully exhibited at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. An invitation to serve on the jury at the Carnegie Institute exhibition the following year led to Anglada's first visit to the United States. In 1931 he exhibited in the 'Foreign Section'  of the Carnegie International exhibition, which also travelled to Cleveland and Chicago. Included in the show, La Gata rosa would remain in Ohio as a bequest by its then owner, Adan Diehl, also a pupil of Anglada's, to the Toledo Art Museum, in whose collection it has remained ever since.