I was recently studying the highly accomplished work of Casas, whose painting skills easily stand up to those of his better-known contemporaries John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, and Joaquin Sorolla, who all worked in a similar vein. Having just had an overview of his finished work, it was surprising and delightful to see the looseness and boldness of these sketches, often bordering on caricature, that differ from his sophisticated rendered work. What remains the same in both is the strong sense of shape design, a concept often discussed in animation and concept art but not so often in fine art. Casas's use of shape design was likely developed and strengthened by his interest in graphic design, and particularly in his involvement in the developing art nouveau style sweeping Europe in the 1890s. In fact, he is considered one of the key developers of this style in Spain, called 'Modernisme' there. The bold shapes and fluid lines of this style can be seen in the lithographs and posters he designed, and although he remained very much a representational realist in his paintings and portrait drawings, in his later work you can see the influence Modernisme in his sweeping circular compositional choices and in his strong unified color shapes.
