Cau Ferrat Museum

Cau Ferrat, located in Sitges (in Catalonia in Spain), was the home and study of artist and writer Santiago Rusiñol, one of the most important figures of the Modernisme movement in Catalonia. It is one of the three museums in Sitges located on the shores of Sant Sebastià beach.

Born into a bourgeois Catalan industrial family from Manlleu, Santiago Rusiñol i Prats (Barcelona, 1861 – Aranjuez, 1931) was asked by his paternal grandfather and godfather, Jaume Rusiñol, to continue the family tradition and become a cotton manufacturer. Instead, the young Rusiñol chose to enter the Catalan and Spanish art scene. A painter, narrator, collector, dramatist, amateur archaeologist, journalist and key figure of the Modernista movement, Santiago Rusiñol conceived of art as a priesthood and of the artist as the chosen one who, due to an ineluctable calling, is predestined to the sacrifice of living his ideal to the ultimate consequences.

It was from Sitges that Rusiñol spread his theory of Total Art, of art as a new religion. the celebration of the Festes Modernistes (1892-1899), the building of the Cau Ferrat (1893-1894) and the inauguration of the monument to El Greco (1898) made Sitges the Mecca of Modernisme and Rusiñol the high priest of his new movement that aspired to transform society through culture. Thanks to this, Rusiñol was able to build up his own personal mythos.

Rusiñol arrived in Sitges in October 1891 and stayed there until January 1892. In the months that followed he went back frequently (that same year, he organised what would later be known as the first Festa Modernista), until in the spring of 1893 he decided to buy a little fisherman's house next to the sea in the Sant Joan district. The last owner of the house, who had died decades before, had left it in her will to Our Lord God with the intention that the income from the house should be used for saying mass for her soul and those of her predecessors. In view of this unusual situation, an application had to be made to the Ecclesiastical Court of the Diocese of Barcelona for authorisation of the sale, which was finally completed on 30 July 1893.

Rusiñol paid 1000 pesetas for the house and another 2000 to have it knocked down so a new one could be built to serve as a home and studio. The plan was commissioned from the architect Francesc Rogent, who incorporated in the façade the large Gothic windows from Sitges's old castle, recently demolished to make way for the new Town Hall. Rusiñol's home and studio, inaugurated a few months later, inherited the name of Cau Ferrat from the studio in Barcelona the artist had shared until then with his friend Enric Clarasó. Rusiñol soon realized that there wasn't enough room, however, and in May 1894 he bought the house next door to complete the building of the Cau Ferrat as it exists today.

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