Ramon Casas i Carbó (1866–1932) was a Catalan painter, draftsman, and graphic designer born in Barcelona. After training in his native city, he moved to Paris in the 1880s, where he adopted plein air painting and the tonal techniques of the Impressionists. Upon returning to Catalonia, he collaborated with Santiago Rusiñol at the Els Quatre Gats café, a gathering place for avant-garde artists and writers in Barcelona.
Casas’s work included intimate portraiture and large-scale crowd scenes. His charcoal portraits of Barcelona’s bourgeoisie, rendered with drypoint-like precision, depicted figures such as the writer Eugeni d’Ors and the politician Francesc Cambó.
His oil paintings of public events, like "El garrot" (1894), used loose, cinematic brushwork to convey the atmosphere of collective gatherings. As a graphic designer, he created lithographic posters for Anís del Mono, Codorniu, and the journal "Pèl i Ploma", blending Art Nouveau lines with Catalan motifs.
Casas’s modernisme posters, displayed across Barcelona, contributed to the visual identity of Catalan cultural nationalism. Though his later work shifted to academic portraiture, his early fusion of French Impressionist technique with local themes influenced artists in the Noucentisme movement, which later sought to balance modernisme’s decorative style with classical principles.
