Abstract

the author of Our Cover Page, Ramon Casas i Carbó (Barcelona 1866-1930), was a fundamental artist in the Modernist movement, from which he was an exceptional painter and drawer. He was born the same year that the French Pierre Michaud invented the pedal and commertialized the velocipede in Paris. After a bad school period, he started the artistic career in 1877, thanks to an intelligent teacher who discovered his qualities and a wealthyand understanding father who aided in his vocation.
After some years of learnig in Barcelona, as it was usual back then, he moved in 1822 to paris to finish his formation. That year he started the same path as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, with whom Casas had a clear parallelism in age, aesthetic, social condition, and a sport hobby: biking, evidently active in the case of Casas and passive, for obvious reasons, in the case of Toulouse. By then the trnasmision of the movement of the pedals by chain, had favored the substitution of the velocipede of big wheels for the real bicicle and little later, in 1888, Dunlop invents the tire eliminating the heavy metal rims. These improvements made cycling to be of great popularity in the French capital. The cycling liking of Casas was probably born in this first stay in France.