Julio González i Pellicer, born in Barcelona, was a Spanish sculptor and painter who developed the expressive use of iron as a medium for modern sculpture. He was from a lineage of metalsmith workers and artists. His grandfather was a goldsmith worker and his father, Concordio González, a metalsmith worker who taught him the techniques of metalsmith in his childhood years. His mother, Pilar Pellicer Fenés, came from a long line of artists.

Els Quatre Gats is a café in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, that famously became a popular meeting place for famous artists throughout the modernist period in Catalonia, known as Modernisme. The café opened on 12 June 1897 in the famous Casa Martí, and served as a hostel, bar and cabaret until it eventually became a central meeting point for Barcelona's most prominent modernist figures, such as Pablo Picasso and Ramon Casas i Carbó. The bar closed due to financial difficulties in June 1903, but was reopened and eventually restored to its original condition in 1989.