User:The Blue Norange/The Blue Backyard

 The blue backyard (Pati Blau) is a short story (1897) and a two-act play (1903) by the modernist and versatile artist Santiago Rusiñol i Prats. Sitges' typical blue backyards inspired him, like the paintings named Pati Blau and Pati Blau with two girls on the steps. The theatrical version premiered on May 12, 1903, at the Teatre Romea in Barcelona. It was a guaranteed success right until the last performance on October 12. The plot is an adaptation of the story from the book Fulls de Vida (Leaves of Life) and considered by critics of the time the best story out of the book, a collection of short stories.

It tells the story of a painter, Jacint, Rusiñol's alter ego, who asks to paint an ordinary village house's backyard. With a simple language close to the reader, the viewer enters into a world of sensations and tenderness, from the young tuberculosis patient who survives locked up behind the room's window that makes her prison. Both the plants, which decorate the patio, and the girl, seem to bloom simultaneously. Rusiñol addresses one of the most typical themes of the modernist aesthetic current with a poignant ending: the pain and illness of a frivolous and decadent society. He added one more character, the doctor, and changed the sister into a mother for more dramatic final tension in the theatrical version.