(b Barcelona, 6 Jan 1873; d Barcelona, 27 April 1940). Spanish Catalan painter. A pupil of Lluis Graner (1863–1929), he also studied at the Escola de Belles Arts (Llotja) of Barcelona (1894–5). Mir was a member of la Colla del Safrà, a group of young artists who painted the fields in the countryside outside Barcelona. The Cathedral of the Poor (1898; priv. col., see Jardí, pl. 25, pp. 36–7) is among his most important works of this period: it is a realistic group portrait of beggars near Antoni Gaudí’s Temple de la Sagrada Familia during its construction in Barcelona. In 1899 Mir settled with Santiago Rusiñol in Mallorca, where he knew the Belgian symbolist painter William Degouve de Nuncques. However, preferring to live alone, he went to the area around the Torrent de Pareis, a canyon in the north of the island; there he painted a number of extraordinary works, for example the large-scale Enchanted Cove (1.55*2 m; Montserrat, Mus. Abadia), in which the forms merged into evanescent stains of colour. His one-man exhibition in 1901 at the Sala Parés in Barcelona met with public incomprehension, but he was praised by critics as the new great painter of the Catalan landscape. An accident and psychiatric illness ended his Mallorcan period (1904), and he was interned in the psychiatric institute of Reus (1905–6). During his convalescence, which he spent near Tarragona, Mir produced his most creative work, representing the light and colour of the landscape in a bold, almost abstract way, for example Landscape (José Miarnau priv. col., see 1971 exh. cat., cover pl.). He won a first-class medal at the fifth Exposició Internacional in Barcelona (1907) and showed 90 works in a one-man exhibition at the Faianç Catalià gallery in Barcelona in 1909. He also participated in several group exhibitions in Madrid, Paris, Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, Philadelphia and elsewhere, and won the medal of honour of the Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes of Madrid in 1930. In later years he continued to exhibit internationally, for example in Oslo, Venice, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires and London, but his painting became more conventional. This later work did not, however, diminish his achievement from the beginning of the century to the 1920s, not only as an exceptionally creative force in Catalan art but also as one of the most undervalued European Post-Impressionists. Grove Art excerpts - Electronic ©2003, Oxford Art Online en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquin_Mir_Trinxet