José Echenagusía—better known in the art world as Echena, a nickname given to him by José Villegas Cordero (1844-1921)—is one of the most outstanding Basque painters who worked in the précieux academic style in the closing quarter of the nineteenth century. Throughout his long career, Echena was associated with an Italianate language indebted to the influence of Mariano Fortuny (1838-1874), as was the case of most other Spanish artists based in Rome at the time.

Echena developed two parallel lines of work: on one hand, history and religious paintings aimed at winning distinctions in Spanish and international exhibitions; and, on the other, paintings to be sold in the market, mostly in the Basque Country, where he had a strong presence thanks to the works he dispatched from Rome to Bilbao and San Sebastian.

One of them could well be this painting, unique in his output given its distance from the artist’s usual historicist, orientalist and genre depictions, here representing the port of Bilbao with the blast furnace in the background. It may well have been a commission or conceived with the local art market of Bilbao in mind.

Suffused with his characteristic elegance, this urban landscape is painted with great naturalism and a very precise study of light that speaks of his insight into modernism. Echena succeeds in capturing the power of the industrial atmosphere by using a dark palette, dominated by blue and black hues, that contrasts with the points of light concentrated in the flashes coming from the factory in the distance, the orange flames of the blast furnace and the smoke billowing from the high chimneys, whose thickness helps to light up the background and to instil the work with a sense of density. In turn, the intensity of Echena’s rendering of the rippling movement of the sea, together with the reflection of the lights and the buildings on the water are good evidence of the painter’s mastery, further adding to its aesthetic appeal.