ArtistSpanish (Catalan)
Pere Ynglada
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Pere Ynglada i Sallent was born in 1881 in Santiago de Cuba, where his Catalan parents had settled as merchants. His childhood moved between continents: Cuba, then New York, then finally Barcelona, where he enrolled at the Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc. That institution, which had shaped Modernisme in Catalonia, gave him technical grounding, but the city held him only briefly. By the early twentieth century he had settled in Paris, where he would remain for more than three decades.
Paris in those years was pulling in artists from across the Spanish-speaking world, and Ynglada found his circle quickly. He became close to Juan Gris, the Cubist from Madrid who painted in orderly planes while Ynglada worked in the opposite direction, in line and motion. He also knew sculptor Josep Sunyer and critic Josep Maria Junoy. He contributed drawings to the Barcelona satirical press under the pseudonym Yda, appearing in Papitu and L'Esquella de la Torratxa, publications sharp enough to get suppressed during political crackdowns. He also collaborated with the magazine Iberia.
What set Ynglada apart was his approach to drawing animals, and above all horses. He studied Japanese drawing closely, absorbing its economy of line and its willingness to let white space carry weight. Applied to the subject of racehorses in motion, circus equestrians, and acrobats mid-leap, this produced images that look effortless and are in fact extremely difficult: the line had to be correct the first time, because revision would destroy the spontaneity the whole effect depended on. His first major Barcelona showing came at Sala Pares in 1906, followed by a well-reviewed exhibition at the Galeries Laietanes in 1914 that the critic Eugeni d'Ors praised at length. From the 1920s onward he was the standard reference for animal drawing in Catalonia.
He returned to Barcelona and exhibited for the last time at the Pinacoteca in 1943. When he died in 1958 he and his wife, Georgette Guillot, had already arranged for a drawing prize to continue in their names: the Ynglada-Guillot Prize, still awarded in Barcelona, which has supported generations of draughtsmen since.
On the Nordic auction market, Ynglada's work appears almost exclusively through Balclis, the Barcelona-based auction house with strong Nordic ties, accounting for 27 of the 28 lots in Auctionist's database. All 28 items fall in the drawings category, consistent with his reputation as a pure draughtsman. The subjects recorded include jockeys and horses, circus acrobats, a Chinese juggler, and riding-circus studies, a representative cross-section of the themes that defined his career. No final prices are recorded in the current dataset, which reflects the private, specialist character of Balclis sales rather than any absence of market interest.