REGOYOS Y VALDÉS, Dario de
Spanish painter. He spent his childhood and youth in Madrid, where he began his artistic training under Carlos de Haes, enrolling in his basic landscape course in 1877 where he was taught landscape drawing.
Regoyos’s interest in art movements abroad led him to Brussels in 1879, where he stayed with friends, the musicians Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Fernández Arbós. On a recommendation from Carlos de Haes, Regoyos established contact in Brussels with the Belgian painter Joseph Quinaux (1822-1895), who became his most important teacher. Regoyos took painting lessons in the elder artist’s studio for two years. During this time he also registered at the École Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where he attended courses under Joseph van Sevendonck.
Regoyos remained in Belgium for lengthy periods until the 1890s. In 1881, he joined L’Essor, a society of artists who subsequently founded the now highly regarded group Les XX in 1883. He was the only non-Belgian artist in the group.
Regoyos’s style was the product of continuous interaction with artist-friends, including Pissarro, Whistler, Seurat, Signac, Ensor, and Van Rysselberghe, and with the poet Émile Verhaeren, with whom he collaborated on the publication of La Espana Negra and with whom he travelled through Spain, France and Italy.
Regoyos’s oeuvre spans several different phases. The first covers his years in Belgium, during which he mainly produced portraits. The second phase is characterised by philosophical and pre-Symbolist elements and falls under the label of the Espana Negra series. The third, in which his style and use of colour show strong affinities with Impressionism, is the best known. Regoyos showed his work primarily at group exhibitions that aimed to promote the freedom of art. He exhibited in France (often at the Indépendants in Paris and the Galerie Durand-Ruel), Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Britain, Mexico and Argentina.
Regoyos’s work was honoured at an exhibition at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid eight years after his death.
