Marian Vayreda Vila was Joaquim Vayreda's younger brother, a painter and writer and prominent personality in the art scene of his day. He was also involved in local politics and was a skilled businessman. At the helm of the El Arte Cristiano workshop from 1886 to 1903, he was comfortable in all the spheres, religious, business, labour and artistic, and was thus able to make a key contribution to the expansion of the company under his stewardship.

He lived with his wife Pilar Aulet and their seven children on the upper floor of the building that today houses the museum, where the El Arte Cristiano workshop he then oversaw moved to in 1891.

Chiefly famous as a writer, Marian Vayreda is the author of a series of short texts and three novels: Records de la darrera carlinada, Sang Nova and La Punyalada. The first of these novels was published in 1898, when Marian had already painted his most important canvases, and in fact when he had already produced his entire pictorial oeuvre.

La Punyalada, labelled as a book about the mountains just like Sang Nova, which was its ideal model, stands out for the complexity of the psychological processes portrayed and the efficacy of Vayreda's use of symbolism.

As a landscape painter, Marian, along with his brother Joaquim and Josep Berga i Boix, was a member of what is called the Olot School. His works often feature paintings with subjects referring local customs and manners, religion and history. This shows the common ground between Vayreda's literary and visual oeuvre, in his meticulous, precise description of the visual landscape and his knowledge of the tiniest details in the environment and characters, while he consolidated and participated in the political and aesthetic ideology of the Catalan mountain setting.

As Francesc Fontbona said, “More than the landscape that his brother painted, Marian Vayreda is interested in the content of the landscape. For this reason, in his paintings and writings he narrates life in La Garrotxa and narrates it with a clear realism.”