Holy Week as a public manifestation of the faith of certain brotherhoods has been deeply rooted in Sevillian tradition since the late Middle Ages. However, in the wake of the Council of Trent and during the Baroque period, the stations of the cross were commended to the new brotherhoods. By the second third of the 19th century that event had come to be seen as a reason for the celebration of a liturgical festival. The Seville of Isabella II was an ideal setting for processional parades and these began to be represented through Romantic artistic manifestations, particularly paintings, featuring images supposedly typical of local customs. Such paintings were easily sold to travellers arriving in the city and their dissemination was aided by the links with and protection accorded to brotherhoods by the Montpensiers. Romanticism took charge of the pictorial portrayal of Sevillian processions, promoting their image until the end of the 19th century, at which point regionalism technically renewed that image, its aim being to turn the picturesque legend into a definition of specifically Andalusian characteristics and give rise to a beneficial process of reflection on all things regional.

Gonzalo Bilbao is regarded as the most characteristic renovator of Romantic genre painting in the early days of Sevillian regionalism, at the beginning of the 20th century. His work thus acquired that popular and picturesque character which painters of previous generations had wished to imprint on their own works. The spiritual essence of his genre painting continued to be Romantic, with only forms and technique changing. Indeed, the latter possesses the deeply Sevillian,