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“Dos gitanas (Two Gypsies)” by Francisco Iturrino (Spanish) - Oil on canvas / c 1901–1903 - Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga (Málaga, Spain) #WomenInArt #FranciscoIturrino #Iturrino #MuseoCarmenThyssenMalaga #MuseoCarmenThyssenMálaga #SpanishArtist #SpanishArt #AndalusianArt #art #artText #arte #1900sArt
This painting belongs to the period when Spanish artist Francisco Iturrino first immersed himself in southern Spain and found in Andalusia a new language of color. Andalusian themes became central to his work, and here he is less interested in anecdote than in atmosphere like heat, brightness, conversation, and presence. The title identifies the figures as gitanas, a historical Spanish term for Romani women, but the picture also reflects the era’s habit of turning Andalusia into an “exotic” imagined South. Two women stand outdoors in a courtyard washed in warm southern light. The woman at left is fuller-bodied and poised, her medium-brown skin framed by dark hair pinned back with a red flower. She wears a creamy white mantón with long fringe over a cool lavender-blue skirt. One hand rises lightly toward her chest, and her face turns away in a distant, inward-looking expression, as if she is listening while thinking of something else. Beside her, a slimmer woman with deep brown skin and dark, softly waved hair, tucked with a yellow flower, faces her companion more directly. She stands with one hand on her hip and the other relaxed at her side, projecting confidence and alert attention. Her dress glows in bands of orange, gold, and red, topped by a lively red-and-white shawl. Behind them, green foliage, a pale wall, and stone paving create a setting that feels intimate yet sun-struck. Iturrino paints with broad, visible strokes, so fabric, skin, and plants shimmer. Each woman carries a distinct emotional force. At the same time, the work participates in a broader early-20th-century fascination with Andalucía as spectacle. Iturrino, born in Santander and raised in Bilbao, was at this moment moving toward the radiant palette and liberated brushwork that would make him one of Spain’s most vivid colorists. Here, light is almost the third subject as it binds white fringe, orange stripes, black hair, and flowers into a scene that feels both observed and dreamlike.
April 18, 2026 at 2:30 AM
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“Una bailaora” (A Flamenco Dancer) by Gonzalo Bilbao Martínez (Spanish) - Oil on canvas / c. 1913 - Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga (Málaga, Spain) #WomenInArt #art #artText #GonzaloBilbaoMartinez #GonzaloBilbaoMartínez #Arte #MuseoCarmenThyssenMalaga #SpanishArt #SpanishArtist #MuseoCarmenThyssenMálaga
Painted around 1913, when Spanish artist Gonzalo Bilbao Martínez was in his mature, widely celebrated period, this painting frames flamenco as lived, private culture rather than staged entertainment. A young woman dances indoors, her body arcing into a bold curve as one arm lifts high and the other gathers her shawl at the waist. Her skin is light-to-medium under warm, artificial light. Her dark hair is dressed with bright red carnations. She wears a wide, dark Cordovan hat tipped at an angle, a short necklace, and a pale fringed shawl (mantón) that ripples across her shoulders and down her torso. Below, a tiered skirt in soft rose tones swings around her legs, edged with lighter ruffles while a white boot peeks out as she steps forward. Behind her, a seated woman accompanies on guitar, her face in shadow, wearing a red blouse and a blue skirt. The setting is humble and domestic with white crockery on a small shelf, an earthenware vessel near the floor, and a small religious image on the wall. A dark shadow to the dancer’s side possibly suggests another figure just out of view like an unseen witness to this intimate performance. The room lacks the showy décor of tourist-oriented cafés; instead, everyday objects and the close proximity between dancer and guitarist evoke a gathering you’re invited into, not a spectacle you buy a ticket for. Bilbao’s lighting does important storytelling as it “spotlights” the dancer’s face and torso, carving her movement from the gray wall, while vivid accents (carnations and violet shadows in the ruffles) heighten the sensuous energy of the moment. In early 20th-century Spain, debates about “modernity” sometimes dismissed traditions like flamenco as backward. Bilbao (Sevillian by birth and deeply attached to Andalusian life) answers by making its beauty undeniable. The result is both portrait and defense depicting a woman’s artistry, rendered as dignity, joy, and force in motion.
March 1, 2026 at 8:37 PM
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“Julia” by Ramon Casas (Spanish) - Oil on canvas / c. 1915 - Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga (Spain) #womeninart #art #portrait #womensart #fineart #portraitofawoman #RamonCasas #MuseoCarmenThyssenMálaga #ArtText #oilpainting #JuliaPeraire #SpanishArtist #Spanishart #portait #1910s #artoftheday
In Spanish artist Ramon Casas’s extensive catalogue, female portraits are particularly common and represent the essence of his activity. In the painter’s hands, this kind of portrait took on an essentially sensual and decorative aspect, since the models were almost always depicted in vaguely suggestive and provocative poses. One of his favourite models was Julia Peraire, a beautiful lottery ticket vendor in the Plaza de Cataluña. When Casas met her at a gathering at the Maison Dorée, he was dazzled by the freshness and beauty of her youth – she was twenty-five years younger than him. After living together for several years, they married on September 29, 1922. Casas portrayed his lover in the most varied of poses and attires. The results were generally very attractive in spite of their conventional style, although with great intuition the artist made up for their apparent lack of expressiveness with that special sensitivity he always displayed in his use of color and his ability to reflect unassumingly but clearly the slightest hint of a woman’s suggestiveness. This was the key to his outstanding success in this genre and a feature he repeated over and over again in the last years of his life. In this portrait, Julia is seated, hands on hips, in a traditionally popular and almost defiant attitude, dressed in the most typical Spanish costume: a bright red matador jacket embroidered in black over a waistcoat with silver threads, in perfect harmony with the color of the dress, the comb and the flowers in her hair. Casas’ use of the reds and blacks that offset the pearly whiteness of the model’s complexion, with her soft delicate traits, the almost metallic coldness of the dress and the neutral background, achieved by rubbing the paint on the canvas. The artist added a clearly erotic message in the depiction of his model’s bare neck and generous décolletage, with her steady, slightly haughty gaze directed at the onlooker and the red of her lipstick.
May 8, 2025 at 6:49 AM
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“La Buenaventura (The Fortune-telling)" by Julio Romero de Torres (Spanish) - Oil on canvas / 1920 - Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga (Málaga, Spain) #WomenInArt #JulioRomeroDeTorres #RomeroDeTorres #MuseoCarmenThyssenMalaga #arte #BlueskyArt #artText #spanishartist #SpanishArt #FortuneTelling #1920sArt
Two women sit on a deep window ledge, shown in profile against a dreamlike view of Córdoba, Spain. At right, a dark-haired young woman in working-class dress folds her legs beneath her and raises a tarot card for the other to see. At left, her companion leans back with a long, elegant neck, heavy-lidded eyes, and a face turned inward with melancholy. Their bodies are close, but their moods do not meet. The fortune-teller seems alert, almost sly. The other woman appears distant, absorbed by private sorrow. Spanish artist Julio Romero de Torres stages them with velvety skin, dark hair, and sculptural stillness, setting their figures against a city assembled like emotional theater. In the middle distance, another tiny drama unfolds: a woman seems to reach toward a man as if trying to stop him, while farther back a red-shawled figure lingers in a doorway. The whole scene feels paused between prophecy and aftermath. Romero de Torres was already a celebrated painter by 1920, known for images of women that fused Andalusian identity, symbolism, desire, and unease. Here, he turns card-reading into a meditation on love’s imbalance. The cards are not light entertainment, but are a warning. The museum’s interpretation links the painting to sadness, indifference, and dangers of loving a married man, with the secondary scene acting almost like a cinematic flash of the story behind the sitter’s stress. The layered storytelling matters. the picture is not simply about “fortune” but about emotional knowledge, especially the kind women are left to carry, intuit, and survive. Romero de Torres often used paired women to suggest dualities like sacred and profane, innocence and experience, or hope and resignation. In this work, the contrast is quieter and more human: one woman reads signs, the other lives their consequences. The invented yet recognizable Córdoba behind them turns private heartbreak into civic myth, making female feeling the true monument at the center of the canvas.
April 7, 2026 at 8:44 PM
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Una bolera (A Bolero Dancer) by Antonio Cabral Bejarano (Spanish) - Oil on canvas / 1842 - Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga (Spain) #womeninart #art #dancer #oilpainting #bolero #bolera #AntonioCabralBejarano #artwork #womensart #SpanishArt #SpanishArtist #style #MuseoCarmenThyssenMálaga #CabralBejarano
Antonio Cabral Bejarano was a Spanish painter, considered to be an adherent of both the Romantic painting styles found across Europe and the specifically Hispanic painting school of Costumbrismo. His ancestors for several generations were painters, and he was initially trained by his father before he and his own sons became active in his native city of Seville, getting many commissions from its municipal government before becoming the first Director of the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville. In "A Bolero Dancer" (Una bolera), Cabral Bejarano takes us to the banks of the river Guadalquivir, in Seville’s riverside district of Triana opposite the Arenal and the Torre del Oro, which are clearly visible in the background. We see a young women with fair complexion dancing and playing the castanets. Dressed in the typical pink costume of bolero dancers, identified by the cut, pointed white hem and ruffles of the dress and by the demi-pointe shoes that were used solely for dancing, she performs a typical dance step with castanets. The composition, in which the dancer is depicted opposite one of Seville’s main landmarks, is significant as it combines the most appealing aspects of the city in the first half of the 19th century – its fascinating Arab ruins and ancient buildings – with the bolero, which from the Romantic Age became one of the most successful dances performed in theaters across Europe, identified clearly with Spain and, initially, with Andalusia. There are multiple versions of this, but this one clearly displays certain exquisite painterly details that set it apart from the others. The artist takes the liberty of varying certain features of the figure, giving it an individual quality, such as the position of the dancer’s necklace, in which the strands are separated, and the rendering of the swirling flounces of her skirt and the background foliage in very supple brushwork.
April 17, 2025 at 6:38 AM
“Playing on the Beach.” Cecilio Pla y Gallardo (Spanish; 1859–1934). Oil on cardboard, n.d. Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, on loan to the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga.

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September 6, 2024 at 8:30 AM
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A second post from Málaga today, as we get to grips with Andalusian art at the Museo Carmen Thyssen.

👉 saltertonartsreview.com/2025/12/muse...

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Museo Carmen Thyssen, Málaga – Salterton Arts Review
The Museo Carmen Thyssen presents a private collection of mostly Andalusian, 19th century art. A great way to learn more about this region and its representation in art, just get ready for a lot of ge...
saltertonartsreview.com
December 14, 2025 at 8:32 AM