"La sirga" (The towrope) fan

Polished pear wood. 23 cm (rod). Made in Spain.

Anselmo Guinea Ugalde painted La sirga ("The Towrope") in early summer 1892. In it he looks out over the banks of the Nervión, where two women are engaged in the activity that gives the work its name, a type of river navigation in which boats are pulled by means of a rope. When this work was exhibited in Bilbao, there had long been calls for it to be banned because of the terrible effort it entailed. However, in this work, more emphasis seems to be placed on the intense summer luminosity that bathes the scene and shades the chromatic power of the landscape than on the social criticism that would be seen years later in the painter's work.