Bilbao Fine Arts Museum (Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao) in Bilbao, Spain
The splendid Spanish Romantic painter Eugenio Lucas Velázquez (1817-1870) created this small-scale, dramatic realism painting, The Communion (La comunión), in 1855. The scene in the painting suggests a religious ritual or event set against a dark, cavernous backdrop, creating a sense of mystery and atmosphere. The man in a clerical vestment is in the center of the composition, offering the sacrament of the Holy Communion to a large congregation of faithful worshippers, who are all gathered around.
The foreground shows a close-up of two women in traditional attire, each holding a rosary and praying silently, creating a sense of intimacy and insight into their daily lives. It is a personal story of private devotion and communal worship in a difficult time during mid-19th century Spain, when the two bent heads push the piece into that of the costumbrista (regional customs), a true dimension.
This little painting is technically accomplished and masterfully executed and has a lot of ‘punch.’ The whole assembly unfolds by Lucas Velázquez, with broad general strokes and fast, non-nuanced brushstrokes, impastos and expansive slashes of paint, which emphasize the emotional over the clinical. It has great lighting, and the white light is piercing through and ghostly looking from the right. The praying figures are starkly outlined, shadowed, and ghostly in appearance, and the entire scene is quite moody, with a lot of darkness and light.
The fast succession of the palette’s execution, the caricatured faces, and the tension of the painting’s atmosphere reveal the great Lucas Velázquez’s interest in the late paintings of an artist working in Francisco de Goya’s style. Lucas Velázquez’s work on the copperplate is today viewed as the most talented and innovative heir to the Goya style in the 19th century and brings together the qualities of the traditional and academic landscape with those of the spontaneous and emotional of early expressionism. The great inheritance of Laureano de Jado made ‘The Communion’ a jewel of Spanish Romanticism, which is currently at the Bilbao Museum.
The above artwork is an excellent example of art in Romantic era, which focused more on mystical feelings, human emotions, pain, tragedy and socio-political happenings and how they influenced and affected people and an individual as a human, standing completely opposed to the plastic sense of modernity and mechanisation that had emerged in Europe during the eighteenth century with the dawn of so called 'Enlightenment era'. As a piece of art, it is a commendable work in the way oil paint has been used here on a metallic surface to give a realist as well as a surrealist effect to the scene being depicted in the painting. The colouring, use of light and shade, realistic sketch of figures and the way the subjects carry their expression- speaks volumes about the art and the artist.
