The Internationalisation of Spanish and Latin American Art in the Long Nineteenth Century

‘Spain’s modern painters are but mediocrities’ declared Richard Ford, the influential British Hispanist, in 1845. At the 1855 Universal Exhibition in Paris, critics proclaimed the death of Spanish art in similar terms: it lacked the ‘soul of Zurbarán and Velázquez’. These assertions, which relegate Spanish art to the past, exemplify what an anthropologist might term the ‘denial of coevalness’. Nineteenth-century Latin American art was, in turn, regarded by European critics as derivative of Iberian traditions. Such attitudes have had lasting consequences.

While European and North American traveller-artists in Iberia and Latin America have received considerable attention, artists who hailed from these regions have often been marginalised, creating significant gaps in our understandings of global nineteenth-century art. Many Iberian and Latin American artists enjoyed productive international careers, exhibiting in Paris, London, and other European cities, as well as in the United States.

This panel invites contributions that explore the internationalisation of Iberian and Latin American artists during the nineteenth century. To what extent did they assimilate or resist aesthetics, styles, and ways of seeing that were familiar to their northern European counterparts? To what extent did they engage with or disavow the exoticising gaze – to which their work was often subjected – through style and particular subject matter, such as modern infrastructure and industry? What tactics and strategies did they deploy to present and market their work abroad? How did international critics respond to their work, and how do nineteenth-century attitudes to their work resurface in art writing today?

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Claudia Hopkins, University of Edinburgh, c.hopkins@ed.ac.uk  

Daniel Sobrino Ralston, The National Gallery, daniel.ralston@nationalgallery.org.uk