The Blue Courtyard, Arenys

Painted in 1914, this work is the third in a series of four views of the distinctive “blue courtyard” that Rusiñol created while staying at the home of his friend and publisher Antoni López in Arenys de Munt, a hill town in northern Catalonia. The Museu d’Art Modern holds the first two versions in Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya, while the fourth remains in a private collection.

The Catalan painter, Santiago Rusiñol, is best known for his depictions of Spain’s formal gardens, which he approached as architectural spaces—sequences of rooms to be experienced and explored. In The Blue Courtyard, this relationship is inverted: an interior is transformed into a landscape. The scene depicts an outdoor kitchen, saturated in vivid blue and sheltered from the sun by a lush, trellised canopy overhead.

Beyond his achievements as a painter, Rusiñol was a founding member of Barcelona’s avant-garde circle Els Quatre Gats and a passionate Modernist writer who advocated for the renewal of Catalan culture across the arts, from visual art to literature. 

P.S. Explore the stunning gardens of Santiago Rusiñol! They are very soothing.  :)