page_title: Costumbrismo
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Costumbrismo / Literary costumbrismo in Spain / Origins
caption_attribution_description: This painting is part of the "Black Paintings" series and depicts two men with cudgels fighting
context_page_description: Costumbrismo is the literary or pictorial interpretation of local everyday life, mannerisms, and customs, primarily in the Hispanic scene, and particularly in the 19th century. Costumbrismo is related both to artistic realism and to Romanticism, sharing the Romantic interest in expression as against simple representation and the romantic and realist focus on precise representation of particular times and places, rather than of humanity in the abstract. It is often satiric and even moralizing, but unlike mainstream realism does not usually offer or even imply any particular analysis of the society it depicts. When not satiric, its approach to quaint folkloric detail often has a romanticizing aspect.
  Costumbrismo can be found in any of the visual or literary arts; by extension, the term can also be applied to certain approaches to collecting folkloric objects, as well. Originally found in short essays and later in novels, costumbrismo is often found in the zarzuelas of the 19th century, especially in the género chico. Costumbrista museums deal with folklore and local art and costumbrista festivals celebrate local customs and artisans and their work.
context_section_description: Antecedents to costumbrismo can be found as early as the 17th century (for example in the work of playwright Juan de Zabaleta) and the current becomes clearer in the 18th century (Diego de Torres Villarroel, José Clavijo y Fajardo, José Cadalso, Ramón de la Cruz, Juan Ignacio González del Castillo). All of these writers have, in at least some of their work, an attention to specific, local detail, an exaltation of the "typical" that would feed into both costumbrismo and Romanticism. In the 19th century costumbrismo bursts out as a clear genre in its own right, addressing a broad audience: stories and illustrations often made their first or most important appearance in cheap periodicals for the general public.  It is not easy to draw lines around the genre: Evaristo Correa Calderón spoke of its "extraordinary elasticity and variety". Some of it is almost reportorial and documentary, some simply folkloric; what it has in common is the effort to capture a particular place (whether rural or urban) at a particular time.
  Sebastián de Miñano y Bedoya (1779–1845) is considered by some a costumbrista, although arguably his writing is too political to properly fit the genre. According to Andrés Soria, the first incontestable costumbristas are the anonymous and pseudonymous contributors to La Minerva (1817), El Correo Literario y Mercantil (1823–33) and El Censor (1820–23). Later come the major figures of literary costumbrismo: Serafín Estébanez Calderón (1799–1867), Ramón de Mesonero Romanos (1803–82), and Mariano José de Larra (1809–37) who sometimes wrote under the pseudonym "Fígaro". Estébanez Calderón (who originally wrote for the abovementioned Correo Literario y Mercantil) looked for a "genuine" and picturesque Spain in the recent past of particular regions; Mesonero Romanos was a careful observer of the Madrid of his time, especially of the middle classes; Larra, according to José Ramón Lomba Pedraja, arguably transcended his genre, using the form of costumbrismo for political and psychological ideas. An afrancesado—a liberal child of the Enlightenment—he was not particularly enamored of the Spanish society that he nonetheless observed minutely.
  Costumbrismo was by no means without foreign influences. The work of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele nearly a century earlier in The Spectator had influenced French writers, who in turn influenced the costumbristas. Furthermore, Addison and Steele's own work was translated into Spanish in the early 19th century, and Mesonero Romanos, at least, had read it in French. Still, an even stronger influence came by way of Victor-Joseph Étienne de Jouy (whose work appeared in translation in La Minerva and El Censor), Louis-Sébastien Mercier (especially for Le Tableau de Paris, 1781–88), Charles Joseph Colnet Du Ravel, and Georges Touchard-Lafosse. In addition, there were the travelogues such as Richard Ford's A Handbook for Travellers in Spain,  written by various foreigners who had visited Spain and, in painting, the foreign artists (especially, David Roberts) who had settled for a time especially in Seville and Granada and drew or painted local subjects.
  While Estébanez Calderón, Mesonero Romanos, and (insofar as he fits the genre) Larra were the major costumbrista writers, many other Spanish writers of the 19th century devoted all or part of their careers to costumbrismo. Antonio María Segovia (1808–74), who mainly wrote pseudonymously as "El Estudiante" and who founded the satiric-literary magazine El Cócora; his collaborator Santos López Pelegrín (1801–46), "Abenámar"; many early contributors to Madrid's Semanario Pintoresco Español (1836-57), Spain's first illustrated magazine; and such lesser lights as Antonio Neira de Mosquera (1818–53), "El Doctor Malatesta" (Las ferias de Madrid, 1845); Clemente Díaz, with whom costumbrismo took a turn toward the rural; Vicente de la Fuente (1817–89), portraying the lives of bookish students (in between writing serious histories); José Giménez Serrano, portraying a romantic Andalusia; Enrique Gil y Carrasco, a Carlist from Villafranca del Bierzo, 
caption: Some of the work of Goya can be seen as prefiguring costumbrismo, especially as practiced in Madrid. Here, the Fight with Cudgels, one of Goya's Black Paintings.
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