"Flowers and fruits" notebook

Lined paper. Stapled binding. A5 (15 x 21 cm). 32 sheets (64 pages).

María Luisa de la Riva was one of the painters who enjoyed the greatest public recognition in 19th-century Spain. Specialising in flower painting, she fought hard to achieve fame, managing to separate herself as an artist from her husband, the painter Domingo Muñoz Cuesta. This makes her one of the protagonists of the first major episode in the professionalisation of women painters on the peninsula. In Flowers and Fruits (1887) she took great pains to evoke the textures of the great variety of flowers and fruits in this complex composition, which is depicted on the cover of this practical notebook.