Joaquim Mir and the Toyshop: microhistory of a portrait

Abstract

Can a pictorial portrait inspire a micro-history exercise? Our research will try to bring a positive answer to this question by assessing one of the few portraits by the post-Impressionist painter Joaquim Mir Trinxet dating back to 1926. The main depicted character is none other than the painter’s father in-law, Antoni Estalella Trinxet, a well-known person in Vilanova y la Geltrú (Barcelona) who lived between two centuries. The painting is set at the family’s store. Therefore it became one of the rare masterpieces showing the inside of a toyshop in Spain’s pre-civil war period. Thanks to the research carried out at local archives, this contribution brings together many unpublished documents. The latter allow us to reconstruct the life of the portrayed man, who became Francisco Pi y Margall’s correspondent, but also the Villanova’s social, artistic and commercial environment, in a period spanning from the 1870s to the early 20th century, during the “Golden Age” of the toy industry. These pages mean to be a historiographical methodology proposal whose origins are set at the archaic craft of cooperage leading finally to the dawn of toy’s modern trade.