Lluís Rigalt, professor and director of the School of La Llotja, is considered the first naturalist landscape painter in Catalonia and the forerunner of a school to which such important painters as Martí Alsina, Modest Urgell and Joaquim Vayreda belonged.
His paintings are painted in oil, meticulous and elegant, straddling the idealized romantic landscape and naturalism. The landscape genre in Catalonia and the taste for the natural environment follow the European dynamics of the late 18th and 20th centuries when England, Italy, and mainly France with the Barbizon School, represent the nearby geography, the result of their contemplation and investigation of the atmospheric and light effects observed in the landscape.
Traveling painter, we know more than a thousand drawings and watercolors made in nature, between the forties and nineties of the 19th century, all over Catalonia.
Painted rural landscapes before the middle of the 19th century were carried out by draftsmen or military painters who knew the terrain. Leaving the urban centers and moving involved too many dangers and was infrequent due to the lack of infrastructure.