Spanish Peasants dancing the Bolero

Spanish Peasants dancing the Bolero   

John Frederick Lewis, 1836 

Tinted lithograph with later hand colouring 

The lithograph is one of twenty-six lithographs included in Lewis’s Sketches of Spain and Spanish character (1836). These prints were worked up from watercolours which Lewis had created in Spain during much the same time as Roberts had been in the country. Roberts and Lewis never met in Spain, but they had slightly different priorities. Roberts was more interested in landscape and architecture, while Lewis, as a genre painter, was above all interested in the Spanish people, their customs and manners, an interest he also shared with Richard Ford. 

Like Ford’s comments on Spanish ‘character’ in his famous Handbook for Travellers in Spain and Readers at Home (1845) and his essays in Gatherings from Spain (1847), Lewis’s lithographs offer a colourful portrayal of Spaniards as a lively, passionate and sensual people always ready to enjoy themselves. For example, Ford was to observe that music was a ‘serious affair’ in Spain, especially among the lower classes. ‘In a venta and court-yard, in spite of a long day’s work and scanty fare, at the sound of the guitar and click of the castanet, a new life is breathed into their veins’.1 Correspondingly, the lithograph on display here captures the fresh atmosphere of an outdoor gathering, with a couple dancing a bolero, a dance much admired by foreigners as exotic and that Ford described as the ‘pantomime of love’.2 The lithograph is based on a watercolour in the Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery.  

Notes:  

1 Richard Ford, Gatherings from Spain (London: John Murray, 1851, new edition), p. 330. 

2 Ibid., p. 324.  

Title: Spanish Peasants dancing the Bolero.  

Author/Artist: John Frederick Lewis. (1804-1876). 

Technique and Material: Tinted lithograph with additional hand-colouring, paper.  

Size: 270 x 370 mm (image), 550 x 370 mm (page).  

Published: Plate 1, Frontispiece, from John Frederick Lewis, Sketches of Spain and Spanish character made during his tour in that country in the years 1833-4, London: F G Moon [1836]. Printer: Charles Joseph Hullmandel.  

Date: 1836. 

Marks and Inscriptions: bottom right: ‘J. F. Lewis 1836 / Peasants dancing the Bolero’.  

Institution: Barry Ife Collection.