19th-20th Century Spanish

Matilla i Marina was born in Madrid in 1862, although his family moved to Barcelona when he was a child. There he started studying art at the Lonja School, where he was a pupil of Antonio Caba (1838-1907).

In the second half of the nineteenth century he travelled to Italy and Paris, and started taking part in major art events, like the 1897 or the in the same year, where he obtained an Honorary Medal.

Throughout his career Matilla earned a name as a portraitist, although he specialised mostly in the painting of landscapes and seascapes, very much in tune with the style of Eliseu Meifrèn (1857-1940), with whom he went on several landscape painting expeditions. This genre won him considerable fame and a regular clientele thanks to the high demand for this kind of painting at the time.

In the early 1900s he had several solo exhibitions, including, among others, those held at Sala Parés in 1914 and Salón Vilches in Madrid in 1915, where all the works on display were sold. These two shows alone led to the consolidation of his reputation as one of the most celebrated Catalan painters of the time.

The painter died in Teià, Barcelona, in 1937 and five years later, Galerías Pallarés dedicated a posthumous exhibition to his life’s work.