MADRID.- Families sharing afternoon chocolate, villagers dancing during a patron saint’s festival, pilgrims resting beside a fountain and rural laborers carrying out difficult work with quiet dignity come together in a new exhibition at the Museo del Prado.
The museum has reunited for the first time the complete series of eight genre paintings created by Valeriano Domínguez Bécquer between 1866 and 1867. Commissioned for Madrid’s former Museo de la Trinidad, the paintings were dispersed among different institutions beginning in 1877 and have not been shown together as a complete group until now.
Presented in the Prado’s Gallery 60 under the title “Valeriano D. Bécquer (1834–1870): Genre Paintings,” the exhibition offers an unusually direct view of everyday life in 19th-century Spain.
Although Valeriano is sometimes overshadowed by his younger brother, the celebrated Romantic poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, his paintings reveal an artist with a sharp eye for clothing, gesture, work, ritual and community.
Rather than idealizing rural Spain, Bécquer approached the people he encountered with unusual objectivity. His woodcutters, spinners, villagers and pilgrims are not treated as picturesque accessories. They occupy the center of the image and are presented with individuality and dignity.
The project began when Bécquer received a royal pension in 1865 to document regional customs for the Museo de la Trinidad. Over the following two years, he traveled through areas of Aragón, Soria and Ávila, producing three groups of paintings alongside numerous drawings.
His first delivery, made from Vera del Moncayo in Aragón, included two richly observed scenes. One shows the interior of a village home as women and family members gather to drink chocolate in the afternoon. The other captures the eve of a patron saint’s celebration, bringing together local officials, dancers, costumes and traditional festivities.
Bécquer paid particular attention to regional dress. The bright fabrics and carefully differentiated clothing in these paintings provide a visual record of communities undergoing profound social and economic change.
The three paintings inspired by Soria are considered among the strongest works in the series. During his travels around Villaciervos and Burgo de Osma, Bécquer painted a woodcutter, a spinner and a crowded village dance.
The labor scenes acknowledge the physical hardship of rural work without diminishing their subjects. The woodcutter and spinner appear as distinct individuals rather than generalized “types,” while the dance offered the artist an opportunity to fill the canvas with movement, conversation and closely observed human detail.
These journeys were also personally significant. Valeriano traveled through parts of Soria associated with his brother Gustavo Adolfo, whose poetry and prose would become inseparable from the landscape and folklore of the region.
For the final group, painted in Ávila in 1867, Bécquer turned his attention to the pilgrimage to the hermitage of Our Lady of Sonsoles in the Amblés Valley.
One painting shows pilgrims resting beside the hermitage fountain. The other two focus on individual figures: a young countrywoman carrying a basket of offerings and a man dressed in ceremonial clothing associated with the armed guards or halberdiers who appeared in Castilian religious festivals.
The Prado describes the series as one of the finest surviving examples of Spanish genre painting from the 19th century. Its importance lies not only in its artistic quality, but also in Bécquer’s refusal to turn rural life into sentimental theater.
An unusually rich documentary record has also survived. The painter’s own written descriptions of the works remain intact, and extracts are included in the exhibition, allowing visitors to compare the artist’s words with his visual observations.
The presentation expands beyond the eight paintings to include letters, an etching, period photographs of now-lost drawings and an illustrated magazine page. These materials reveal how Bécquer’s images circulated in the decades after their creation.
In some cases, his drawings became better known than his paintings because they were reproduced as engravings in popular illustrated journals. Copies and printed versions also demonstrate the influence his realistic approach had on younger artists.
The exhibition forms part of the Prado’s newly named Open Storage program in Gallery 60. Since 2009, the room has functioned as an evolving space for works from the museum’s 19th-century holdings, presenting focused exhibitions, technical studies, donations and lesser-known chapters of Spanish art.
By bringing the eight paintings back together, the Prado restores the unity of a project conceived more than 160 years ago. The result is both an artistic reunion and a social portrait: a record of celebrations, labor, devotion and domestic life made at a moment when modern Spain was beginning to take shape.
