The Laughing Girl

Santiago Rusiñol i Prats was a Catalan painter, poet, and playwright. He was one of the leaders of the Catalan modernisme movement, and influenced Pablo Picasso as a modern artist, and also left a number of modernist buildings in Sitges, a town in Catalonia. Rusiñol was born in Barcelona in 1861, to a family of textile industrialists from Manlleu. Despite the fact that he was the heir to the family's lucrative operations, the teenage Rusiñol showed more interest in painting and travel. Like so many artists of the day, he travelled to Paris in 1889, where he discovered a love for modernism.

This painting shows a playful side of the artist, but his talent allowed him to paint like Toulouse-Lautrec, Sargent, van Gogh, Morisot, Renoir or anyone else he fancied. In fact, it may have been his great talent that kept him from developing his own style, because one always gets the feeling from Rusiñol's works that one is looking at a masterwork, but without being able to recall exactly who. But it would be wrong to call him a dilettante, so perhaps we can celebrate his wonderful Catalan style while Spain debates Catalan independence.

- Clinton