This itinerary covers the period bookended by and by the period just prior to the Civil War, the years when the Spanish avant-gardes emerged.

The selection highlights the wealth of Spanish painting at that time, with examples of full-blown , in which genre scenes featuring popular types, and customs and manners were a constant (Rodríguez de Guzmán). Besides panoramic landscape painting (Gonzalvo) and the paintings of interior representations and perspectives (Kuntz), two popular genres in this period, we should also add examples of plein-air landscapes, evidencing a naturalist sensibility that extolled the power and beauty of nature, and a realism in which the depicted motif is interpreted in a direct manner (Martí i Alsina).

The importance given to Spanish painting in Rome, the major art capital where painters studied throughout the century (Sorolla, Villegas, Guinea, Peña and Gallegos Arnosa), was on a par with that lent to Paris, associated with high society (Madrazo) and the Orientalism so fashionable in those days (Madrazo, Villegas).

Apart from those readings clearly indebted to painting from the past, we can clearly perceive an evident impressionist renewal (Regoyos) and the freedom of Catalan Post-Impressionism (Gimeno), as well as symbolist landscape painting (Rusiñol and Raurich) and a Naturalism focused on the treatment of light (Meifrén, Sorolla, Santa María, Mongrell, Matilla, Martínez Cubells and even Bertuchi).

A reaction against that course taken by painting is visible in a large group of works, imbued by a more expressive aesthetic connected with the ideology of the Generation of ‘98 (Zuloaga, Iturrino and Arteta). The influence of French culture and the return of a new monumentality were counterbalanced by a focus on regional subject matters (Sotomayor) and a taste for ornamentation distinctive to (Nieto).

Finally, there are some examples of the ripple effect of the avant-gardes in Spain, with the unique recreation of practiced by some Spanish painters based in Paris at that time (Viñes), in certain cases employing an even more severe sense of geometry (Vázquez Díaz). Those innovations, together with a burgeoning interest in the urban landscape of New York (Vaquero Palacios), comprise an interesting catalogue of the new directions opened up in Spanish painting during the first third of the 20^th century.