Nude with a Guitar

Ramon Casas i Carbó was a Catalan Spanish artist. Living through a turbulent time in the history of his native Barcelona, he was known as a portraitist, sketching and painting the intellectual, economic, and political elite of Barcelona, Paris, Madrid, and beyond.

This painting was probably created in the painter's studio placed in the number 94 of the Gràcia Promenade in Barcelona, where his family settled on the year 1894 and where he had a wide and bright space. The frame and the guitar, according to art historians, would suggest that. Casas was a skilled performer of guitar, since he learned to play it during his stays in Granada.

Casas was interested in the possibilities of the nude, though without seeking provocation. This is one reason his figures never gaze out at the hypothetical spectator. In the Cau Ferrat collections there are three oil paintings by Ramon Casas depicting female nudes.