THE WHITE SUBUR

When Santiago Rusiñol came to Sitges for the first time in 1891, not only was he one of Barcelona’s most renowned artists during this period thanks to the novelty of his painting, based on verism and emotional intensity, but his image was also starting to become inseparable from that of the modern artist, in other words, the artist who lives from and for art, making his calling a gift that was humanly impossible to elude and, therefore, turning art into a priesthood of sorts. Convinced that beauty, in a prosaic, materialistic society like the industrial one, was the only balm and consolation the modern individual could find, Santiago Rusiñol discovered Sitges to be an ideal setting for the role he had decided to play: the role of a priest of art, an intermediary between beauty and a reality perceived as unhealthy in as much as it alienated the individual.