Pueyrredón, Prilidiano (1823-1870)
Patio porteño en 1850 (Courtyard in Buenos Aires in 1850)
c.1860
Oil on copper, 30.2 x 43 cm
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
This small painting has been overrated in its quality, for example the comment by Romero Brest: “Despite his acute sense of the picturesque, Pueyrredón rarely tackled the picturesque theme par excellence: the painting of customs. Nevertheless, he painted Patio porteño in 1850 (after Schiaffino painted in 1860), a small masterpiece. The rigorous objective precision of the forms is imposed –with traces of neo-classical abstraction in the figure of the woman on the right of the painting- both in the background of the urban landscape and in the figures, within an apparently spontaneous composition, in an attitude similar to that of the Dutch painters of the 17th century or of Chardin in the 18th century, authentic naturalists.” To this exaggeration he later adds, more successfully, the Spanish influence.
The small painting is undoubtedly interesting for the development of the genre of urban costumbrismo, little developed before except in some watercolors by Carlos Pellegrini and in the lithographic albumens, since the prints of César H. Bacle, but generally exterior scenes with architectural profiles or elegant salons. Pueyrredón‘s achievement is to have synthesized an interior scene with the visual sensation of an exterior view through the buildings that stand out from the poor structure of the chicken coop in the last patio. A successful sum of narrative details: the black maid with the eggs, the lady throwing the corn to the chickens, the lady of the house looking at the chicks. The use of shadows and the texture of bricks, the wood of the chicken coop, the whitewashed parts, the dirt floor, add small chromatic variants in a palette dominated by ochres and reddish tones. (Roberto Amigo | MNBA)