The procession surprised by the rain

Dating from 1867, this scene of a religious procession caught by sudden rain shows Fortuny at his most brilliantly observational. Rain and crowd movement were technically demanding subjects for any nineteenth-century painter — both required the ability to suggest transience through paint without freezing it into academic stiffness. Fortuny had studied Velázquez carefully in the Prado and absorbed lessons in how to suggest atmospheric conditions without illustrating them literally. The work also reflects his sustained interest in Spanish popular religious culture, which he documented with the curiosity of an anthropologist and the freedom of a modernist. Held in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, the painting belongs to the body of Spanish genre subjects that preceded his full commitment to orientalist material. The chaos of figures ducking under cloaks and awnings is resolved through Fortuny's instinctive compositional intelligence.

Wet pavement reflections are indicated through rapid horizontal strokes of muted color that mirror the figures above without descriptive detail. Fortuny uses broad, swift marks for the crowd and reserves more deliberate handling for the central processional figures that anchor the composition. Rain is implied through tonality rather than rendered droplet by droplet.