Like in many other places at the end of the nineteenth century, in the largest Pitiusa Island an interest in reproducing ground-truth images emerged: photography. Several events, landscapes, portraits, among other subjects, are frozen and captured in an image for the future to come. In this world of "technological innovations", the curious artist spirit of the young Narcís Puget Viñas, considered by many to be the father of modern painting in Eivissa, grew and developed. At first, his concern was to capture reality quite faithfully and, as a result, he travelled to Barcelona to be trained in photography. However, once there, he quickly realised reality was made up of colours, hues, textures, and began to show an interest in art. Greatly influenced by Impressionism he started his training, specifically in painting.

Upon returning to Eivissa, he combined his work as a photographer with teaching pictorial technique in an atelier to those young men who showed an interest in it: Josep Tarrés, Antoni Pomar, Vicent Ferrer Guasch and his own son, Narcís Puget Riquer, among others. Many of his pupils developed defined personalities and creative techniques. Since the 1930s and later on, in a second stage in the 1950s, that batch of young painters, disciples of Ciset, as the old painter and teacher was known, coexisted with the arrival on the island of many artists from all over Europe. Those artists sought after refuge, being enchanted by Mediterranean colours, a pleasant climate and a kind of social environment, based on the premise laissez fer, laissez passer.

Most of those foreign artists created the group Ibiza 59, a greatly influential artistic cluster. Cosmopolitan and groundbreaking people, whose ways of expression and pictorial techniques were abstract and avant-garde. In turn local painters, also outstanding technically and artistically, founded the group Puget in 1962. Following the former impressionist technique taught by Puget Viñas, they all left an important personal mark comprising scenes painted in a costumbrista style (depicting everyday manners and customs), local landscapes, seascapes, portraits and still lifes. This figurative painting style would evolve from Antoni Mari Ribas Portmany‘s thick brushstrokes to Ferrer Guasch’s stylised lines and luminous whites; from Puget Riquer’s outstanding watercolour technique to Pomar’s scenes inspired by Sorolla; and from Josep Tarrés, the painter with topaz eyes, to Tur Costa, possibly the father of abstract painting in the Balearic Islands.

Up until today, the artistic scene of Eivissa gathers a wide mix of different techniques, themes, disciplines... giving way to a variety of trends and styles that reveal its remarkable artistic production and innovative creative initiatives.