Costumbrismo (in Catalan: costumisme; sometimes anglicized as costumbrism, with the adjectival form costumbrist) is the literary or pictorial interpretation of local everyday life, mannerisms, and customs, primarily in the Hispanic scene, and particularly in the 19th century, i.e. a localized branch of genre painting. Costumbrismo is related both to artistic realism and to Romanticism, sharing the Romantic interest in expression as against simple representation and the romantic and realist focus on precise representation of particular times and places, rather than of humanity in the abstract.José Escobar, Costumbrismo entre Romanticismo y Realismo, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel Cervantes. Accessed online 2010-01-22.Antonio Reina Palazón, El Costumbrismo en la Pintura Sevillana del Siglo XIX , Biblioteca Virtual Miguel Cervantes. Accessed online 2010-01-22. It is often satiric and even moralizing, but unlike mainstream realism does not usually offer or even imply any particular analysis of the society it depicts. When not satiric, its approach to quaint folkloric detail often has a romanticizing aspect.
Costumbrismo can be found in any of the visual or literary arts; by extension, the term can also be applied to certain approaches to collecting folkloric objects, as well. Originally found in short essays and later in novels, costumbrismo is often found in the zarzuelas of the 19th century, especially in the género chico. Costumbrista museums deal with folklore and local art and costumbrista festivals celebrate local customs and artisans and their work.
Although initially associated with Spain in the late 18th and 19th century, costumbrismo expanded to the Americas and set roots in the Spanish-speaking portions of the Americas, incorporating indigenous elements. Juan López Morillas summed up the appeal of costumbrismo for writing about Latin American society as follows: the costumbristas' "preoccupation with minute detail, local color, the picturesque, and their concern with matters of style is frequently no more than a subterfuge. Astonished by the contradictions observed around them, incapable of clearly understanding the tumult of the modern world, these writers sought refuge in the particular, the trivial or the ephemeral."Juan López Morillas, El Krausismo español (1980), p. 129, quoted by Enrique Pupo-Walker, "The brief narrative in Spanish America 1835–1915", 490:535 in Roberto González Echevarría, Enrique Pupo-Walker, The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature: Discovery to modernism, Cambridge University Press, 1996, . p. 491 accessed on Google Books.
Literary costumbrismo in Spain
Origins
Antecedents to costumbrismo can be found as early as the 17th century (for example in the work of playwright Juan de Zabaleta) and the current becomes clearer in the 18th century (Diego de Torres Villarroel, José Clavijo y Fajardo, José Cadalso, Ramón de la Cruz, Juan Ignacio González del Castillo). All of these writers have, in at least some of their work, an attention to specific, local detail, an exaltation of the "typical" that would feed into both costumbrismo and Romanticism. In the 19th century costumbrismo bursts out as a clear genre in its own right, addressing a broad audience: stories and illustrations often made their first or most important appearance in cheap periodicals for the general public.Andrés Soria, Costumbrismo I. Literatura Española , Ediciones Rialp S.A. Gran Enciclopedia Rialp, 1991. Accessed online 2010-01-20. It is not easy to draw lines around the genre: Evaristo Correa Calderón spoke of its "extraordinary elasticity and variety".Quoted in Andrés Soria, Costumbrismo I. Literatura Española , Ediciones Rialp S.A. Gran Enciclopedia Rialp, 1991. Some of it is almost reportorial and documentary, some simply folkloric; what it has in common is the effort to capture a particular place (whether rural or urban) at a particular time.
Sebastián de Miñano y Bedoya (1779–1845) is considered by some a costumbrista, although arguably his writing is too political to properly fit the genre. According to Andrés Soria, the first incontestable costumbristas are the anonymous and pseudonymous contributors to La Minerva (1817), El Censor (1820–23) and El Correo Literario y Mercantil (1828–33). Later come the major figures of literary costumbrismo: Serafín Estébanez Calderón (1799–1867), Ramón de Mesonero Romanos (1803–82), and Mariano José de Larra (1809–37) who sometimes wrote under the pseudonym "Fígaro". Estébanez Calderón (who originally wrote for the abovementioned Correo Literario y Mercantil) looked for a "genuine" and picturesque Spain in the recent past of particular regions; Mesonero Romanos (whose work began appearing anonymously in periodicals as early as 1822) was a careful observer of the Madrid of his time, especially of the middle classes; Larra, according to José Ramón Lomba Pedraja, arguably transcended his genre, using the form of costumbrismo for political and psychological ideas. An afrancesado—a liberal child of the Enlightenment—he was not particularly enamored of the Spanish society that he nonetheless observed minutely.
Costumbrismo was by no means without foreign influences. The work of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele nearly a century earlier in The Spectator had influenced French writers, who in turn influenced the costumbristas. Furthermore, Addison and Steele's own work was translated into Spanish in the early 19th century, and Mesonero Romanos, at least, had read it in French. Still, an even stronger influence came by way of Victor-Joseph Étienne de Jouy (whose work appeared in translation in La Minerva and El Censor), Louis-Sébastien Mercier (especially for Le Tableau de Paris, 1781–88), Charles Joseph Colnet Du Ravel, and Georges Touchard-Lafosse. In addition, there were the travelogues such as Richard Ford's A Handbook for Travellers in Spain, written by various foreigners who had visited Spain and, in painting, the foreign artists (especially, David Roberts) who had settled for a time especially in Seville and Granada and drew or painted local subjects.
While Estébanez Calderón, Mesonero Romanos, and (insofar as he fits the genre) Larra were the major costumbrista writers, many other Spanish writers of the 19th century devoted all or part of their careers to costumbrismo. Antonio María Segovia (1808–74), who mainly wrote pseudonymously as "El Estudiante" and who founded the satiric-literary magazine El Cócora;Ángeles Ezama Gil, José Enrique Serrano Asenjo (editors), Juan Valera, Correspondencia, Vol. 2: Años 1862-1875, Nueva biblioteca de erudición y crítica, Editorial Castalia, 2002, . p. 39. Available online on Google Books. his collaborator Santos López Pelegrín (1801–46), "Abenámar"; many early contributors to Madrid's Semanario Pintoresco Español (1836-57Ficha de publicación periódica: Semanario pintoresco español, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. Accessed online 2010-01-20.), Spain's first illustrated magazine; and such lesser lights as Antonio Neira de Mosquera (1818–53), "El Doctor Malatesta" (Las ferias de Madrid, 1845); Clemente Díaz, with whom costumbrismo took a turn toward the rural; Vicente de la Fuente (1817–89), portraying the lives of bookish students (in between writing serious histories); José Giménez Serrano, portraying a romantic Andalusia; Enrique Gil y Carrasco, a CarlistRicardo Gullón, La vida breve de Ricardo Gil, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel Cervantes. Accessed online 2010-01-20. from Villafranca del Bierzo, friend of Alexander von Humboldt, and contributor to the Semanario Pintoresco Español;Enrique Gil y Carrasco, Biografías y Vidas. Accessed online 2010-01-20. and many other regionalists around Spain.
The Spanish Drawn By Themselves
Much as literary costumbrismo had been influenced by English models, often by way of France, the same occurred with the equivalent in the visual arts, but with far more recent models. In a period when physiognomy was in vogue, Heads of the People or Portraits of the English was serialized in London starting in 1838 and was published in its entirety in 1840–41. It combined essays by such "distinguished writers" (the volume's own choice of words) as William Makepeace Thackeray and Leigh Hunt with pictures of individuals emblematic of different English "types". This was followed in France by a work first serialized as Les Français, Moeurs Contemporaines ("The French, Contemporary Manners", beginning in 1839) and published in a volume in 1842 as Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. Encyclopédie Morale du dixneuviéme siécle ("The French, drawn by themselves. Moral Encyclopedia of the 19th Century"). The Spanish soon followed with Los españoles pintados por sí mismos ("The Spanish Drawn By Themselves") serialized from 1842 and published in a volume in 1843.An 1851 edition of Los españoles pintados por sí mismos is available online at Google Books.
A collective and hence, necessarily, uneven anthology of "types", Los españoles… was a mixture of verse and prose, and of writers and artists from various generations. Illustrators included Leonardo Alenza (1807–45), Fernando Miranda y Casellas, Francisco Lameyer (1825–1877), Vicente Urrabieta y Ortiz, and Calixto Ortega. The writers included Mesonero and Estébanez as well as various less costumbrista writers and many not usually associated with the genre, such as Gabriel García Tassara (1817–75) or the conservative politician Francisco Navarro Villoslada (1818–95). Andrés Soria remarks that, except for the Andalusian "types", everything was from the point of view of Madrid. Unlike later costumbrismo, the focus remained firmly on the present day. In some ways, the omissions are as interesting as the inclusions: no direct representation of the aristocracy, of prominent businessmen, of the high clergy, or of the army, and except for the "popular" classes, the writing is a bit circumspect and cautious. Still, the material is strong on ethnological, folkloric, and linguistic detail.
In an epilogue to Los españoles…, "Contrastes. Tipos perdidos, 1825, Tipos hallados, 1845" ("Contrasts. Types lost, 1825, types found, 1845"), Mesonero on the one hand showed that the genre, in its original terms, was played out, and on the other laid the ground for future costumbrismo: new "types" would always arise, and many places remained to be written about in this fashion. The book had many descendants, and a major reissue in 1871. A particularly strong current came out of Barcelona: for example, José M. de Freixas's Enciclopedia de tipos vulgares y costumbres de Barcelona ("Encyclopedia of vulgar types and customs of Barcelona", 1844) illustrated by Servat,Josep Izquierdo, Goya en tiempos de guerrilla artística, Libro de Notas, 2008-07-25. Accessed online 2010-01-20. and El libro Verde de Barcelona ("The Green Book of Barcelona", 1848) by "José y Juan" (José de Majarrés and Juan Cortada y Sala. The very title of Los valencianos pintados por sí mismos (Valencia 1859) gave a nod of the hat to the earlier work,