This work is an interesting example from the prolific career of this Barcelona-born painter who specialised in landscape painting, regarded by many scholars as one of the most influential nineteenth-century painters from Catalonia.

His landscapes are indebted to Realism —a result of his contact with the work of Courbet and Corot in Paris— and also to . Nonetheless, he forged his own highly personal style, removed from any particular art movement. Urgell is not a static creator of unreal landscapes but of real existing places. Largely owing to his liking for travel and his great capacity to analyse his surrounding world, his landscapes are inspired by at least fifty or more different geographical locations, mainly in Catalonia —like Olot, Barcelona and Gerona— but also in the rest of Spain and Portugal and in France.

Technically speaking, this painting is highly interesting, with a different finish for each distinct area of the landscape it depicts. For instance, the section of the lane in the foreground is solved with elongated impastoed brushwork, dominated by the ochre tones of a rural path practically invisible in the twilight. Next to it, the borders of the grove are executed with a more vertical stroke, outlining the upward thrust of the trees that break the overall horizontality of the composition. Finally, the horizon line of the sky with scattered clouds is rendered in pastel, purple and violet hues with a looser, more agile and carefree stroke indicative of the painter’s know-how.

Some scholars believe Urgell i Inglada’s landscapes contain a symbolic element, more specifically defined by the duality of life and death: signs of life can be seen in the chimneys that suggest the warmth of the hearth and a sense of humanity; in opposition, death is expressed through the tenebrism of the twilight and the solitude of these settings he has depicted so masterfully.