Haystack at Villafranca de la Sierra (province of Ávila)
Technical details
Description
In his Haystack at Villafranca de la Sierra (province of Ávila) Benjamín Palencia, an important landscape artist and founder of the School of Vallecas, shows a threshing floor belonging to this Castilian village where he had spent all his springs and summers since 1942 painting in silence and solitude. The painting shows farmers stacking the straw leftover after threshing to form a haystack, which would protect it from the elements during the winter. The figures of the farmers, in white shirts, contrasts perfectly with the dark and golden colours of the straw on the land above the village, against a background of the surrounding mountains and the road providing access to the locality. The landscape is painted with broad and rapid brushstrokes in the Expressionist style, and with the "Iberian Fauvism" used by Benjamín Palencia in his regeneration of the austere Castilian landscape.