He had Joan Vicens as his teacher, but he did not want to go to art school. At the age of just 16 he went to live in Paris, where he studied with Carolus-Duran. A few years later, in 1889, he went off to Paris again, where he coincided with M. Utrillo and S. Rusiñol, with whom he had exhibited several times at Sala Parés (Petritxol, 5). Before coming back to Barcelona he spent a short time in Madrid, where he studied the painters in El Prado Museum.

His early works still owed a lot to realism, but only technically, not conceptually, and he later became one of the representatives of Modernista painting, especially with the Impressionist-style works he did while he was in Paris (Plein air, 1890-1891; MNAC collection; Montmartre, 1891, Víctor Balaguer Library Museum, Vilanova i la Geltrú).

On returning to Barcelona, he founded, together with P. Romeu, S. Rusiñol and M. Utrillo, the Quatre Gats café (Montsió, 3 bis) and was the driving force behind, and one of the contributors to, its magazine, called first Quatre Gats, then Pèl & Ploma and finally Forma. In 1890 he put on an exhibition at Sala Parés together with S. Rusiñol and E. Clarasó, the first of many the three artists staged on their own together. He also exhibited at the Salon du Champs-de-Mars in Paris, and at one or two exhibitions in Madrid and abroad. During his stay in Paris he met Charles Deering, a rich American with whom he travelled round the United States, Cuba and Central Europe, taking advantage of the trip to make portraits of the bourgeoisie of those places.

He also worked as a poster designer, displaying a formidable mastery of composition and the use of colour.

The series of charcoal portraits he made of many Catalan intellectuals and artists during the final years of the 19th century and which were published in the magazine Pèl i Ploma, are extremely interesting: many of them (like the Portrait of Raimon Casellas below) are reproduced in this book.