Nonell painted figures of gypsies until 1907. With a sober, introspective and respectful look, he portrayed an old woman resting; the model was known as Grandma, of gypsy ethnicity. Reluctant to modernist aesthetics, his models were few and far between: Consol, the gypsy who provided him with his “grandmother”, represented in this work, his cousin and a new gypsy, Chata, in the last period. Consul and his grandmother died tragically in the hut where they lived, due to a hurricane.
Returning from his first trip to Paris in 1898, where he met the gallerist Ambroise Vollard who would sell him work, in Barcelona Nonell shared a workshop with his friend Joan Osó and began to paint the same model that was in the studio at that time: a gypsy. In time he would be known as the “painter of the gypsies”.
His way of painting was intense with very long sessions, working intensively on the preparation of the canvases, between ten and twelve canvases at a time, experimenting, and until considering that he could face the last layer resulting from a single and long session, and so for each of the works, and never a repeated painting.
The conception of his painting, the “ugliness” of his figures, the sobriety of masons, was misunderstood and rejected by critics and contemporaries of the time. A theme that fits with social awareness and the most marginal and disadvantaged classes in urban modernity, and in the midst of an era of conventional looks and aesthetics, which recreated the atmospheres typical of affluent society and urban and technological progress. His gypsies do not dance or show off in Manila shawls, they suffer in silence a stark reality. Due to economic imperatives, his works are mostly small, this is a relevant work also because of its large format.