Spanish school; end of the 19th century.

Spanish school; late 19th century.
"The fruit seller".
Oil on canvas.
Measurements: 34 x 57 cm; 55 x 77,5 cm (frame).
A rural and idealized landscape serves in this case as the setting for a social portrait of 19th century Spain. Two young people direct their gaze towards a basket with a baby located in the center of this landscape scene. The presence of a still life composed of melons, the landscape itself and the clothes of the two young women give us a costumbrista look, completely idealized, where the author shows us the kind face of motherhood and youth. Technically the drawing dominates the composition, although the author applies the color through short and effective brushstrokes that generate certain dynamism that is reinforced with the use of a chromatic range of warm tones very typical of pictoricism.
The new nineteenth-century genre painting was born as a way of interpreting a growing sense of national consciousness, now present in the middle class as it advanced towards social hegemony. To a certain extent, the painters' concern was to deepen the vision of their country through a language, that of painting, that everyone could understand, thus helping the common people to understand the nature and meaning of their nationality, especially as it had manifested itself in the recent past, still alive in the memory of the elders. Of the two fundamental costumbrista schools of 19th century Spain, the one from Seville and the one from Madrid, the latter differs from the kindly picturesqueness of the former in its more pungent and harsh vision, sometimes going so far as to show not only the vulgar, but even recreating itself in torn visions of a clichéd world of the slums, in which the spirit of criticism is evident.

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