Taponeras del Ampurdán (Corkmakers of Ampurdán)

This painting was awarded the second medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1904, at a time in which social painting was particularly topical. This trend was manifested in a reaction to history painting, which, after witnessing years of success, was starting to become tired and worn in the art world. Innovative in this work by Laureano Barrau is the chosen subject matter: women working in the industrial field at a time, around the turn of the twentieth century, when women’s integration into the world of remunerated work was gaining traction. A bona fide revolution entailing a shift in the ideas around femininity that had hitherto dominated, and which would pave the way for the modern woman in the 1920s.

The representation of the working world, lit by warm colours, is not without beauty and poetry, as much for the colour choice as the masterly use of light, with the considerable influence of the Naturalism of Joaquín Sorolla and French Realism.

It also represents a group of Catalan female workers busy producing corks, but none of whom meet the viewer’s gaze, perhaps because they are concentrating on the task at hand or through a calculated omission owing to the potentially all-seeing eye of the employer. Following Barrau’s study of perspective, the window in this piece serves here as a vanishing point, managing to evoke a look at the blurred outside world to which these female workers, for the time being at least, have no access.



Raúl Martínez Arranz