This oil painting is an interesting example of the single-subject practice of this prolific Barcelona-born painter, regarded by many scholars as one of Catalonia’s most influential nineteenth-century painters.

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.

Far from depicting a quaint landscape, the painting conveys an air of neglect, melancholia and solitude. In his own words, Urgell’s landscapes describe in detail “the small, barren and dilapidated Catalonia of mine, with no flowers or plants, with no woods, mountains or groves of alder trees: that sad, still and solitary Catalonia dominating the horizontal line I have been so heavily criticised for, that fence, that cypress tree (…)”.

The small church, the central element of the composition, stands derelict, blending in with nature as yet another element of it. The artist captures the moment of the sunset, a common feature in his landscapes, with a palette of pink hues applied with utmost dexterity. The last rays of daylight still fall on the foreground, while the twilight is starting to cast shadows over the middle ground. There is not the slightest hint of idealisation in the setting, and instead we find the severest and most sombre side of everyday life.

Technically, the work is quite similar to other pieces by this painter. The foreground is solved with vibrant albeit matter-laden brushwork, while the sky is also rendered with the same loose stroke, but much less impastoed.

Here again, the depiction of symbolically charged elements like chapels, churches, graveyards and cypress trees gives the work a brooding sense of death and withdrawal.