José Alarcón Suárez

JOSÉ ALARCÓN SUÁREZ (Madrid, active in the last third of the 19th century).
"Andalusian lady",
Oil on canvas.
Presents restorations.
Measurements: 100 x 75 cm.
Nineteenth-century painting belonging to the Spanish school and folklorist tradition, very much in vogue in the nineteenth century. The young woman portrayed, wearing a mantilla and a comb, adopts a pensive attitude and looks away from the spectator, turning her gaze towards a distant point. The painting is resolved with loose and rapid brushstrokes in the case of the landscape that is sketched. However, the figure rises imposing and with precise workmanship that defines all the details of the clothing and facial features where its naturalism reveals a certain character of the protagonist. This type of work became popular in the nineteenth century inscribed in a taste for the exaltation of the local and the definition of an identity.
Specializing in the genre of costumbrista and portraiture, Alarcón trained as a painter at the Escuela Superior de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado de San Fernando, in Madrid. He submitted works to various competitions, and sent works to the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid since 1871. He is represented in the Prado Museum Traditionally, Spanish painting and literature of the 19th and 20th centuries have been interested in popular customs and types. Sorrolla himself commented "I want to give, always within the verism of my school, a representation of Spain; not looking for philosophies, but the picturesque of each region". This trend spread throughout all the provinces of Spain, Andalusia being the most famous in the representation of popular life. Therefore, this type of work was very common and appreciated in Spanish art from the nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century. Where the creation of popular patterns portrayed through an idyllic vision where the author is influenced by an aesthetic and romantic heritage, developed during the second half of the nineteenth century and which resulted in a localist conception of the landscape, in works that reflected the love for the land itself and the beauty and lyricism of the everyday, the close, the familiar.