Pau Piferrer i Fàbregas (Barcelona 1818 – Barcelona 1848) studied law and humanities; after having taught privately, he had a position in the Barcelona Institute from 1845 until his death; he also worked as a librarian. Piferrer was impressed with Walter Scott’s work (he translated The Lay of the Last Minstrel as “Canto del ultimo trovador”, 1843) and, like his friend Manuel Milà i Fontanals, took a progressive-liberal political stance. He took an active part in the revolutionary events of the summer of 1835 in Barcelona, and even in the direct military action against the Carlists the following year; and he published Romantic tales in El Vapor (1837). However, in the face of what he considered revolutionary excesses and the radicalization of French Romanticism, Piferrer became more conservative. He discussed his new conservative outlook in his journalism in El Guardia Nacional (1838), La Discusión (1847), which he founded and directed, La Corona (1843), which he directed, and the Diario de Barcelona, to which he contributed extensive literary and musical criticisms.

This new outlook underpinned his literary contributions to Recuerdos y bellezas de España, a work celebrating the country’s natural and architectural beauties, with lithographic prints from drawings by Francesc X. Parcerisa. Piferrer edited the two volumes on Catalonia (1839, 1843) and the one on Majorca (1842). The appreciation of the past that Piferrer professed (in the manner of Scott and Chateaubriand) indicated how he had moved from an enthusiasm for the Gothic (in Hugo’s Romantic-Liberal fashion) to a preference for the community Romanesque, which was to become a recurrent trope among Catalan art historians. Although Piferrer is remembered above all for Recuerdos, the literary talent of his earlier writings, with their inspiration from British, German, and French Romantic sources, remained unforgotten. Manuel Milà i Fontanals collected and published his poetry in 1851; by that time Piferrer, who had died prematurely, had already become a veritable legend of his generation.