Watercress Fountain II

Fuente del Berro Series

€165.00


Watercolor on Canson Cotton Paper.
23 W  x 30.5 H cm.
2025
Signed Front B/R.
Unframed.

Unique Piece 1/1.
Cetificate of authenticity printed.
Blockchain QR certified by Certs 365


This watercolor belongs to the Fuente del Berro series and takes as its subject the water that still runs through a historic garden in the middle of Madrid. The Parque de la Quinta de la Fuente del Berro sits against the city’s noise—the M-30, the traffic of Ventas, the ordinary absurdity of the capital—yet inside the walls the ground is older and quieter. The spring is recorded from 1470; the fountain was already in use in the sixteenth century. In 1630–31 Felipe IV bought the Quinta de Miraflores, rich in the waters of the Abroñigal, with huertas, ponds and the spring that lay, then as later, slightly outside the easy possession of any one owner. The Habsburgs trusted this water. It was carried to the Buen Retiro, to the Palacio Real, even to Aranjuez. Carlos III enclosed the source and it was called the Fuente del Rey. The quinta became a public park in 1953, a Jardín Artístico, a pocket of contemplative space where a ría, a cascade and ponds still give the spring a course. This painting is not a view of those amenities. It is about the water running in them.

The large form that occupies the upper sheet reads as a basin seen in section, or as the bowl of a fountain at the moment the surface holds. Layers of blue sit one upon another: a deep indigo rim, a clearer turquoise field, then paler washes that recede like depth or like the skirt of overflow. A thin reserve of paper is left as a white edge—the lip of stone, the glare on the meniscus, the pause between water and air. Darker lines cross the form and continue into the lower field, where a paler network of channels opens out. Those lines are the running: the ría, the feed from spring to pond, the paths water is allowed to take once the fountain has spoken. The city is absent. What remains is flow, volume and the silence of a held surface.

Calm, here, is not emptiness. It is the contrast between the pressure of Madrid and the slowness of a historic hydraulic garden. Fuente del Berro was never Versailles; it was a spring the court prized and a quinta the city later inherited. Contemplative spaces survive because water still occupies them. Ducks and birds, in the park, gather at the edges. The watercolor withholds foliage and anecdote. It keeps only the physics of the place: a body of colour that has weight, and threads that leave it.

Light is the paper. The coarse tooth shows in the unpainted field and inside the thinner washes, so white is not background but the brightness of water in open air—the same brightness you meet on the ponds when the garden goes quiet. Pure pigment, transparent and uncorrected, builds the basin without modelling it as architecture. Where the blue is saturated, it pools and the grain granulates; where it thins, the sheet returns and the colour becomes climate. The dark crossing lines are denser, more mineral, as if the engineered edge of a fountain or the cut of a channel were allowed a different weight from the free wash. That contrast—pigment against paper, volume against line—is the work’s true subject. Each stroke is a declaration of matter. There is no later adjustment.

Texture keeps the garden tactile. You see the weave through the pale blue and beside the indigo. Overlapping washes create a shallow depth close to looking down into a basin and, at the same time, across a plan of the ría. A line that cuts the large form is the reminder that this water is conducted: spring, viaje de agua, cascade, pond. A line that wanders below is the reminder that, once released, it still finds its own course through the city’s heart. Accident is allowed—the uneven fade, the slight bleed at an edge—because a contemplative garden is not a diagram. It is order that can still move.

Surrounded by absurdity, the park offers a paradise on a modest scale: not Le Nôtre’s infinite axis, but a historical enclosure in which water is enough. The fountain speaks; the ría answers; the pond holds. The watercolor returns that sequence to the hand. The stratified blues are the held water. The white rim is light. The dark veins are the running. What the work offers is the essence of Fuente del Berro: a spring and its fountains in the middle of Madrid, a calm made of pigment, paper and flow.