Exhibit highlights 18th-century painter Marià Fortuny's connection to nature

Often overshadowed by the artist's work on military conquest and everyday life, painter Marià Fortuny's depictions of nature are a little-explored aspect of his work. 

The Salvador Vila Seca Museum in Reus, near Tarragona, aims to change that with their free exhibit 'Fortuny: The observation of nature. The power of the gaze' opening this week.

The show will be open through December 14 and marks the end of the Fortuny Year, a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the famed Reus-born painter's death. 

Around 80 Fortuny works have been borrowed from private collections and lent by other institutions such as the Catalan National Art Museum (MNAC), and Spain's Prado and Thyssen museums. 

The exhibit is divided non-chronologically into five areas, each focusing on a different aspect of Fortuny's artistic engagement with nature: botany; skies; the locus amoenus concept of idealized outdoor space; plein-air work; and topographic horizons.

The focus on nature developed as an "inadvertent motif," explained exhibition curator Francesc Quílez, who pointed out that "the cliché of the artist is broken a little" in the exhibit. 

Also among the showcased works are some that have never been exhibited before, such as two sketches of a fan alongside the ultimately finished piece. Quílez emphasized the value of Fortuny's unfinished works and sketches for his commissions, calling the painter "ahead of his time" in his process. 

At the exhibit, Quílez said visitors will experience a perspective on Fortuny and his relationship with nature that "moves away from the most conventional views."