Santiago Rusiñol i Prats (25 February 1861 – 13 June 1931) was a Spanish painter, poet, journalist, collector and playwright. He was one of the leaders of the Catalan modernisme movement. He created more than a thousand paintings and wrote numerous works in Catalan and Spanish.
In 1893 he set up his studio in Sitges, which today stands as the Cau Ferrat. Sitges became a modernist reference point for artists, writers and musicians, including Rusiñol, and modernist festivals, combining theatre, poetry, painting and music were organized there. He continued to write, chiefly narrative works and poems in prose. Some of his novels were adapted and performed in the theatre, such as L'auca del senyor Esteve, written in 1907 and released a few years later. In the first decade of the twentieth century, he consolidated his prestige as a prolific painter and writer, both in Barcelona and throughout Spain and Paris. In 1899, due to a severe illness, he was reunited with his wife. When he recovered, he returned to France with his family to detoxify from morphine addiction. He became an official member of the Paris Salon in 1908.
He was also part of the famous social gatherings of the Els Quatre Gats brewery on Carrer de Montsió in Barcelona run by Pere Romeu, a place of social gathering and an alternative art room, and frequented by a young Pablo Picasso. He maintained close friendships with the painter Ramon Casas and the sculptor Enric Clarasó until his death.
In the following two decades, his prestige grew in Barcelona despite disagreements with Noucentista artists and critics of the time (notably with the art critic Eugenio d'Ors, who wrote in the newspaper La Veu de Catalunya). In 1917, he was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government.
