Spanish school; circa 1840.

Spanish school; circa 1840.
"The guitarist".
Oil on canvas.
It presents craquelure on the pictorial surface.
Measurements: 83 x 63 cm; 93 x 74,5 cm (frame).
In this work the artist reflects an image inherited from the Andalusian costumbrismo of the 19th century, which mainly sought to represent its own types and customs. Thus, we see a young woman adorned with a high quality costume. Formally, the meticulous description of the figure and her clothing stands out, a characteristic of Spanish genre painting and popular scenes, a trend that was highly cultivated in the second half of the 19th century as a result of the Romantic influence of northern Europe. The young woman is depicted in a landscape that is also Romantic in style, with a guitar in her hand. Her posture and melancholy face show us an ideal of woman very typical of the 19th century.
The new genre of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century genre painting was born as a way of interpreting a growing sense of national consciousness, now present in the middle classes as they moved towards social hegemony. To a certain extent, the painters' concern was to deepen the vision of their country through a language, that of painting, which 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 vivid in the memory of the elders.