1
It is good to remember that Proust's first book, Les Plaisirs et les Jours (1896) appeared during this transitional period.
2
Ellen H. Johnson, Modern Art and the Object. A Century of Changing Attitudes (N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 65, 67.
3
Arnold Hauser, «Impressionism», The Social History of Art, II (N. Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), pp. 907, 923.
4
Examples of a critical change of focus in this issue would include: Lily Litvak, A Dream of Arcadia. Anti-Industrialism in Spanish Literature, 1895-1905 (Austin/London: Univ. of Texas Press, 1975); Litvak, Erotismo fin de siglo (Barcelona: Antoni Bosch, 1979); Roland Grass and William R. Risley, ed., Waiting for Pegasus. Studies of the Presence of Symbolism and Decadence in Hispanic Letters. An Essays in Literature Book (Macomb, III.: Western Illinois Univ., 1979); and Noël Maureen Valis, The Decadent Vision in Leopoldo Alas (Baton Rouge/ London: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1981).
5
The interrelationship between painting and literature in late nineteenth-century Spain is, as Richard A. Cardwell has commented, one which really deserves much more study than it has to date received (Introduction, La vida inquieta, by Manuel Reina [Exeter: Univ. of Exeter, 1978], pp. XXXVII-XXXVIII, n. 19). Literary magazines such as La Ilustración Ibérica, La Ilustración Española y Americana, Blanco y Negro, and Revista Nueva published articles, reviews, and reproductions not only of the best-known Victorian painters but of the major Pre-Raphaelites, Paris Salon artists, French Decadent-Symbolists, and Art Nouveau illustrators and painters.
But it was the Catalan modernists in particular who eagerly absorbed the newest trends in Parisian and other arts. The 1888 Exposición Universal in Barcelona; Alfredo Opisso's alert editorship of La Ilustración Ibérica (1882-1900); and Santiago Rusiñol's París articles, «Desde el Molino», which were sent to La Vanguardia in 1890-91, are but three examples of Catalan awareness -and, most important, dissemination- of impressionism, pointillisme, and other aesthetic currents of the period. See also A. Cirici Pellicer, El arte modernista catalán (Barcelona: Aymá, 1951); and Antequera Azpiri, «Whistler en Madrid», La Nación (Buenos Aires), 6 de marzo, 1949.
6
Picón was also a reporter for El Imparcial and other newspapers in 1878-80 while he was imbibing the internationalism of the Exposition Universelle in Paris. In art his tastes were extremely cosmopolitan.
7
Gonzalo Sobejano, Introducción, Dulce y sabrosa (Madrid: Cátedra, 1976), pp. 46-47.
8
Jacinto Octavio Picón, Dulce y sabrosa, ed. Gonzalo Sobejano (Madrid: Cátedra, 1976), pp. 80-81. Henceforth, I will be citing from this edition.
9
Her voice is compared to that of nymphs «que en la antigüedad jugueteaban llamando a su compañera Eco, corriendo y ocultándose tras los troncos de los bosques sagrados» (p. 92).
10
This part of my analysis is dealt with more fully in a just completed monograph, The Novels of Jacinto Octavio Picón, Chapter 7 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press).