A Seville-born painter, Chaves Ortiz trained at the city’s School of Fine Arts and mostly created works featuring bullfighting and genre scenes.

The influence of Murillo and the imprint of Romanticism encouraged him to focus on a genre style, though permeated with a realistic viewpoint, particularly in his pieces related to the world of bullfighting, materialised either in works directly depicting a corrida (with matadors, picadors and bulls) or indirectly remitting to it through representations of countryside scenes with herdsmen, horses and cattle.

The work in hand is a

 tableautin 

(small tableau) were miniature works depicting genre, romantic or military scenes in the taste of the 18^th century. Generally highly refined and detailed, these works were highly popular throughout the 19^th century. Introduced from France, Mariano Fortuny was the greatest exponent of this subgenre in Spain.

, the name given to small oil paintings and boards minutely depicting genres scenes that decorated bourgeois homes mostly in France and Spain in the mid 19th century. Their small format made them easy to move, an advantage given the great demand for these pieces abroad.

This street scene shows two typical characters from Andalusian society: the gentleman wearing a frock coat and a two-pointed hat, and the lady dressed as a maja and sporting a mantilla. The man is attentively reading a royal announcement for a corrida scheduled for 30 August. The poster is pasted over other older ones, one of them advertising the play El sí de las niñas (The Maidens’ Consent) by Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1760-1828).

The same year as the creation of this work, the City Council of Seville commissioned Chaves with a drawing for a poster announcing the city’s Spring Fair. According to the existing documentation on posters, Chaves’ was the first one to introduce artistic elements besides the actual written information on the festival’s events. Up to that moment, the announcements were like those that the character in this work is looking at.