Andalusian School, ca. 1850

Andalusian School, ca. 1850.
"The farewell".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
Measurements: 82 x 105 cm; 92 x 114 cm (frame).

The work in bidding can be related to the artistic plasticity of Robert Kemm, British painter whose passion for Spain led him to immortalize typical costumbrista scenes of the south of our country. This type of pyramidal compositions, simple, with the characters of large dimensions (in this case a couple in love who say goodbye to each other in complicity), monopolizing the pictorial space, were common in his painting. In addition, he usually introduced architectural elements, as in this particular case, in which the last plane is dominated by the facade of a house.

During the 19th century, Spain and England maintained a special relationship. The valuable support given by Great Britain to the patriotic fervor against the French invader, led the Spaniards to look with sympathy to the British. For their part, British painters and literati descended upon Spain, a country that offered them the quintessence of romantic idealism. Perhaps looking for a natural and more authentic landscape, they traveled to the peninsula, where the Industrial Revolution had not yet degraded the face of the landscape. Progress in communications made Spain an exotic, but at the same time close, destination for young English painters who rejected the industrial bourgeoisie and the poverty of spirit that was plaguing the large and ever-growing cities. In fact, after the War of Independence our country began to acquire an aura of exoticism and extravagance that attracted a good number of English intellectuals and artists. The Moorish Andalusia, the bandit, the obscurantist Church, the handsome bullfighter and the maja, the lady with mantilla, the barefoot children, the beggar full of rags, Cervantes' gitanilla... Paintings like the one we present here bring us closer to the essence of romanticism, to the exaltation of the soul as a response to an era that placed the cloth on the altar of Reason. To achieve this goal, Romantic painters stopped subordinating color to drawing, thus reproducing pictorial motifs with more expressive force and greater naturalism. The brushstroke becomes impetuous, the color reaches its autonomy, the impasto is thicker, etc.