Joan Miró

Born in Barcelona, Joan Miró (20 April, 1893-25 December, 1983) came into the world with a huge desire to paint - a desire his dad, a jeweller, did all he could to thwart, forcing him to attend school until he had a nervous breakdown. His parents then bought a farm at Montroig near Tarragona and took young Joan there to recover. When they returned to Barcelona they let him use part of their house at 4 Passatge del Crèdit as a studio; it was so cramped that Miró had to crawl in on his hands and knees (and he wasn’t that big: one old friend described him as ‘an antediluvian glow-worm’).

His early influences were Cézanne and the Cubists, although early on his landscapes, still lifes and portraits, glow in mad colours. He spent summers at Montroig (the subject of his first masterpiece, The Farm), purchased by Ernest Hemingway, who wrote of it:

It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there. No one else has been able to paint these two very opposing things.