Costumbrismo 19th century
José Villegas Cordero was a Spanish painter, master of costume and genre scenes, who directed the Prado Museum from 1901 to 1918.
He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Seville and became known as a talented genre painter, noting interesting domestic scenes and accurately portraying the characters. Domestic painting at that time was very popular with the public. The artist also deals with the themes of the East, with great skill drawing pictures from sketches he made on a trip to Morocco.
In 1898 Villegas Cordero was appointed director of the Spanish Academy in Rome, and in 1901 he was appointed director of the Museo del Prado, the same museum that had once copied Velázquez's paintings himself while studying his art.
Ramón Torres Méndez is a Colombian painter and graphic artist.
A self-taught artist, Méndez achieved great success as a master of miniature portraiture and a representative of the Costumbristo movement. His genre paintings present pictures of Colombian life, which document with documentary accuracy the characteristic types of ordinary people of the mid-19th century, their costumes, occupations and recreation. Méndez's series of drawings, "Customs of New Granada," was lithographed in Bogotá in 1851.
