Markets and fairs in the 1800s

Many of the prints with market and fair scenes that illustrate 19th-century publications were composed by travelling artists, mostly French and English, who arrived in Spain influenced by the ideas of Romanticism.

These "impertinent onlookers" sought out monumental buildings, picturesque corners, legendary characters and ancestral customs to illustrate their publications. The picture shows the Carmona market in Seville.

Artists such as Edward Hawke Locker (1777-1849), David Roberts (1796-1864) and Harry Fenn (1845-1911) reproduced "azogues" and market squares in cities such as Madrid, Segovia, Valladolid, Valencia, Seville and Granada.

With them, the most famous of the Spanish Romantic landscape painters, the Galician Jenaro Pérez de Villaamil (1807-1854), recognised as the leading representative of Spanish Romantic landscape painting.

In some cases, the old free markets are transformed into fair days, adjusting to the agricultural calendar of the surrounding area, and in others, we will see new fairs in which the commercial character coexists with new forms of leisure and entertainment.

Or here is a print of Madrid's Mercado de los Mostenses at Christmas, by the woodcutter and engraver Arturo Carretero (1852-1903), one of the most important woodcutters in Spain at the time.

We can also find genre scenes such as this one of the El Rastro market in Madrid, drawn by the painter Domingo Muñoz and engraved by Andrés Ovejero around 1880.

This picture shows a popular scene with traditional characters in the bird market in the Plaza de San Andrés, Madrid, around 1883.

This engraving by Tomás Carlos Capuz (1834-1899) shows the pig market during the November fair in León, around the time of Saint Martin's Day.

The Museo Universal, a magazine published in Madrid between 1857 and 1869 which contained a considerable number of plates and engravings, published in 1861 a series of illustrations about the street trade in Madrid with drawings by Ortego and engravings by Alva, Still, Severini and Capuz.

Who wants oranges and limes! Sweet oranges and lemons!

In the Illustration Française, a French weekly magazine published between 1843 and 1944, we also find examples of popular Spanish markets, as in the case of this print showing the turkey market in Madrid, close to Christmas.