Allegory of Seville

Rather than allegorical, the human figure that appears in the poster is a woman on horse with a tasseled dress on which she shows a large tambourine with flowers which come down to the foot of the poster, where we can see a hat and a guitar. The artist resolved the distance between the tambourine and the objects on the ground with a violet blanket in polychrome horizontal stripes.

The model he used for the poster was a "breath-taking dark-skinned woman", according to comments at the time. Behind the rider is an aerial view of Seville, with the Giralda featuring prominently on the blue Andalusian sky. The date of the creation and emergence of the first posters of Seville is uncertain, but it can be assumed that the first poster with some artistic element dates from 1881. We therefore have to assume posters in Seville to have been created in the last quarter of the 19th century, with the precedents of banners and strips aiming to tell locals and visitors of the celebrations and public events of the Seville spring fairs.

In line with Guillermo Mateos de los Santos Pérez, we can classify this poster as a picture-poster, that is, a picture produced and used deliberately as a poster. For posters like this, an established painter with awards and national prizes in exhibitions was needed. These picture-posters had excellent drawing and technique with a striking range of colours that made them genuine works of art. De los Santo Pérez includes the posters from 1885 to 1920 in this category. A lithography of the poster appears in Mateos de los Santos's book and has the following measurements: 279 x 125 cm./ 1,000 posters. Lithographic print house: José Ortega (Valencia). 16 inks.