Almuerzo en la Alhambra

Completed in 1872, this sunlit luncheon scene set within the Alhambra complex in Granada represents Fortuny at the height of his orientalist period, yet the work pulses with an intimacy absent from his larger theatrical canvases. Fortuny had visited Granada repeatedly and kept a studio there, absorbing the architecture and light of Andalusia as thoroughly as he had absorbed North African subjects during his Moroccan campaigns of the 1860s. The Alhambra's Nasrid courtyards provided him with a setting that was simultaneously exotic and close at hand — a European version of orientalist fantasy that did not require the physical hardship of crossing the Mediterranean. The scene of figures eating in dappled courtyard light translates the French plein-air ambition of the 1860s into a specifically Spanish idiom. Fortuny died in 1874 at only thirty-six, and works like this were left incomplete or finished in haste, lending them an unguarded freshness that his polished exhibition pieces rarely achieve.

Warm Mediterranean light floods the composition through the characteristic broken-color handling Fortuny developed in his last years. Architecture provides geometric structure against which the loosely rendered figures read as spontaneous notations. The palette of ivory, terracotta, and deep shadow suits the Moorish setting without resorting to picturesque cliché.