The Collection grows
Recent acquisitions
11 April 2014 - 8 June 2014
Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga
Espacio ArteSonado
The vitality of 19th-century popular figures is mainly represented by two schools. On the one hand there is Madrid genre painting, whose wide array of themes and typical characters and local customs were often rendered in scenes with a dark colour range revealing a critical view. On the other there is the Seville style, which reflected a quaint, pleasant picturesqueness redolent of a predominantly foreign point of view in all likelihood due to the large number of travellers who visited that southern region.
One clear exponent of the Madrid school was Eugenio Lucas Velázquez, who during his prolific creative life often drew inspiration from Goya and whose son, Eugenio Lucas Villaamil, was his truest follower. Among the Sevillian genre painters, one of the finest was Manuel Cabral Aguado Bejarano. His work displays the eclecticism surrounding many 19th-century artists and features stereotypes of Andalusian Romanticism as well as images with a certain degree of realism that prove his capacity for detailed observation.
Other major Sevillian genre painters include Rafael Benjumea, whose work, although little-known today, was acclaimed on numerous occasions during his lifetime, and José Roldán, who was influenced by Murillo and whose paintings often contain figures that fill most of the canvas in surroundings dominated by popular architecture.
An artist new to the Collection is Prudencio Herreros Amat, who was born in Murcia but spent most of his life as an artist in Valencia. His oeuvre often contains figures and landscapes typical of the Valencian countryside.
These new acquisitions further enhance the Museum's section of Romantic genre painting, one of the various themes that are explored so uniquely by the Carmen Thyssen Collection.