La casa de la palmera (House with Palm Tree)

In 1911, Joan Miró’s parents purchased a farmhouse in the town of Mont-roig, in Tarragona. It was in this location that, after recovering from an illness at the age of 18, Miró decided to become a painter, strongly against his father’s wishes. From that juncture, the town would be pivotal in his artistic origins and in the development of the work he subsequently produced. In 1918, he left behind the Fauvist style that had shaped his previous period and began to produce works which cast light on the fine detail of his execution — this setting would culminate, in 1922, with Miró now living in Paris, in his masterpiece La masía (The Farm) [National Gallery of Art, Washington]. The emotional landscape of Mont-roig would be a motif running through many of his works from this time, among them La casa de la palmera (House with Palm Tree), a farmhouse in close proximity to his parents’ property. The attention to detail in some of the elements in the composition, for instance the plants, coexists with the simplification of others, such as the tilled land. These elements combine to form the base for the schematic signs that emerged and distinguished his Surrealist work from 1923 onwards.
Miró exhibited the piece at Galerie La Licorne in Paris in 1921, under an initiative backed by Josep Dalmau to internationalise his artists. However, the initiative was ultimately unsuccessful due to a lack of sales.

Raúl Martínez Arranz