ENRIQUE SERRA Y AUQUE (1859 / 1918) "Twilight in the

Moonlight on the Appian Way 1896 Signed and dated in the lower register "Enrique Serra/Rome-1896" Trained in Barcelona with Ramón Martà Alsina, Enrique Serra completed his training in Rome, a city where he met and befriended Mariano Fortuny. There he attended the Accademia Chigi and achieved notable fame with his works, cultivating genre and landscape painting. Landscapes are the most representative of his output and are executed in a highly personal realist style, with precise, meticulous drawing, but with clear romantic connotations, as can be seen in this pair of imposing Roman landscapes depicting the Pontine Lagoon and the Appian Way. They stand out for their compositional flair and their large size, to which must be added the fact that they have preserved their original frames made of walnut wood with a profuse decoration of ovals and darts on their edges, and pearlescent decoration alternating with cantillos on the edges. Their interlacing is decorated with climbing ivy and Roman military motifs of cartouches, panoply, laurel wreaths, the 'aquilae' of the legions and medallions with portraits of emperors. In the canvases, the beauty of these natural spaces is bathed in a faint twilight, in the first case, and a bluish lunar luminosity in the second. In both, the plastic qualities in the elaboration of the vegetation, the reflection in the water, the sky and the abandoned sculptural fragments covered with vegetation stand out, showing the passage of time and giving the composition a poetic and melancholic atmosphere. . 229 x 120 cm. Frame measures: 270 x 156 cm.. Pair of oil paintings on canvas.