The island where painters applaud the sunset

In the winter of 1838 a French novelist and a consumptive Polish composer took rooms in an abandoned charterhouse at Valldemossa. George Sand and Frédéric Chopin were miserable there — the rain, the suspicion of the locals — and Sand's book about the stay was sharp-tongued. But the book existed, and with it Mallorca entered the European imagination as a place a serious artist might go.

Others followed who loved it more. The Austrian Archduke Ludwig Salvator bought up the coast between Valldemossa and Deià, lived there for forty years, and catalogued every cove and custom in his great survey Die Balearen — making the Serra de Tramuntana famous across the courts of Europe. Then, at the new century, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, the father of Spanish modernismo, wintered in Palma and gave the island the name that stuck.

The island of gold.Rubén Darío, “la isla de oro”

What none of them quite started, the painters finished. Drawn by a quality of light that flattened the distance between sea and mountain, a generation of artists arrived to treat the Mallorcan landscape not as a backdrop for history or saints, but as the whole subject — alive, coloured, and worth crossing a continent for. Over the next century the island gathered painters, poets, a composer, patrons and an architect into one of the Mediterranean's most remarkable artistic colonies.

Before the people, the shape of the thing: when each figure came to the island, how long they stayed, and how far they had travelled to get there. The map below sets the whole colony at dusk over the Bay of Pollença. Drag the slider and watch the arrivals wash in across a hundred years.

In 1893, and then in earnest from 1901, the Catalan painter Santiago Rusiñol made the island his refuge, calling it l'illa de la calma — the island of calm. He came with his friend Joaquim Mir, whose canvases of the ravines around Sóller pushed colour almost to abstraction, and was joined by the marine painter Eliseu Meifrén, who took over Palma's School of Art in 1910. In 1899 the Belgian symbolist William Degouve de Nuncques crossed their path and left a mark on Mir's vision.

They did not work in isolation. At the old royal charterhouse of Valldemossa, Joan Sureda and his wife, the painter Pilar Montaner, kept open house — the same rooms that received Rusiñol also hosted Rubén Darío. And the renewal took local root: the Mallorcan painters Antoni Gelabert and Joan Fuster Bonnín painted the Tramuntana alongside the visitors, Fuster becoming the hinge between this generation and the one to come.

A colony is a mix of crafts. There were the painters, of course — the great majority — but also poets and novelists, a single famous composer, the patrons and hosts who made the rest possible, and an architect who built one studio for a friend. Sorted another way, you can watch the island's very manner change: from Romantic reverie, through the plein-air light of the renewal, to the vibrant chromatism of the Pollença School, and on to the moderns.

That second lens is where technique lives — the bold, almost reckless colour the school became known for; the long, loose brushwork; the experimental eye of a master who studied the seabed through a glass visor; and the native painter who, after a war wound to his right hand, taught himself to paint with his left.

The colony found its centre of gravity in 1914, when Hermen Anglada-Camarasa — by then one of the most celebrated painters in Europe — left Paris and settled at Port de Pollença. He came on the urging of his own pupil, the Argentine Francisco Bernareggi, and where the maestro went, his Paris atelier followed: Tito Cittadini, who made the island his life; the Argentines Gregorio López Naguil and Roberto Ramaugé; the Mexican Roberto Montenegro. An entire international studio relocated to one bay.

It drew patrons too. The Argentine poet Adán Diehl, smitten by an Anglada seascape, bought the Formentor peninsula from the family of the poet Miquel Costa i Llobera and in 1929 opened the Hotel Formentor — turning the painters' quiet refuge into an international stage.

Where every evening, as the sun goes down, the painters put down their brushes to applaud. Anglada-Camarasa, describing the bay to Adán Diehl

And it produced a native heir. Dionís Bennàssar, born in Pollença, came into the maestro's orbit around 1926 and absorbed the school's exuberant colour — then bent it to something fiercely his own, a local originality that kept the movement alive rather than embalmed.

None of it happened in isolation. The colony was a web of mentors and pupils, friends, marriages, and the hosts who received everyone — with a few looser threads of influence and shared milieu. Tap any figure to follow their ties; what emerges is a structure, not a crowd.

Now lay the web onto the map. In the chart below, every figure is pinned by when they were on the island and where they came from, and the connection threads are draped across that grid. A line that runs long and steep is a friendship that reached back across years and over an ocean — Anglada's atelier revealed as an Atlantic crossing made local; the native Bennàssar's ties all running upward to the foreigners who taught him; Graves and Miró arriving late and far to the side, each by a different door.

In July 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Mallorca fell almost at once to Franco's Nationalists. The colony shattered along its fault lines. Anglada-Camarasa, stranded in Republican Barcelona, sat out the war at the abbey of Montserrat and then spent nine years exiled in France, not coming home to Pollença until 1948. Robert Graves was taken off Deià by a British warship in 1936 and did not return for a decade.

Others left for good. The patron Adán Diehl, already ruined by the Crash and the war, watched the whole village turn out to see him off, and died far away in Buenos Aires. The Mallorcan poet Gabriel Alomar, who had served the Republic, died a refugee in Cairo. And those who stayed — the native Bennàssar, the Argentine Cittadini, the painter Pilar Montaner — kept the thread unbroken until the others, and a young Joan Miró, could return to a changed island.

The colony never reassembled as it had been, but the island kept its pull. In Deià, Robert Graves built a second, literary world around his house Ca n'Alluny — visitors over the years included Kingsley Amis, Gabriel García Márquez, Alec Guinness and Ava Gardner — drawn there, originally, on a one-line recommendation.

It's paradise — if you can stand it.Gertrude Stein, to Robert Graves

And the greatest name came last. Joan Miró, whose mother and wife were both Mallorcan, had spent the Franco years abroad; in 1956 he came home to Palma for good and built, with his friend the architect Josep Lluís Sert, the vast studio he had always dreamed of. He worked there until his death in 1983. Down the coast, the Hotel Formentor that had ruined Adán Diehl was revived — and through its Conversaciones and the Formentor Prize, founded with Camilo José Cela, it once again gathered the writers of the world to the bay.

A French novelist's miserable winter; an archduke's forty years; a Paris atelier on a fishing quay; a poet's ruined hotel; a painter's left hand; a Nobel laureate's late homecoming. The Golden Island held them all.