Alcalá de Guadaíra Landscape School was called the circle of painters initially summoned by Manuel Ussel de Guimbarda who, from 1890 and around the figure of Emilio Sánchez Perrier, met and painted with a full spirit on the banks of the Guadaíra river, close to said Sevillian town.

Similar experiences in Spain at the end of the 19th century were also: the landscape school of Olot in Catalonia; the artistic colony of Muros de Nalón, in Asturias; or, later, the Bidasoa school, in the Basque Country.

In all of them, with greater or lesser will and group conscience, shy landscape schools developed, in the image and likeness of others that were being created in Europe and America at the time. All of them followed the example of the Barbizon school, in the forests of Fontainebleau near Paris, cradle of impressionist painting and militant pleanirism.

Historical precedents
At the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, the influx of European travelers to Spain, and especially by the exotic Andalusia, attracted writers, geographers, artists and painters. Of the last has been a rich graphic documentation. In it you can find examples of unexpected pioneers of the landscape school Alcalareña, such as David Roberts (1796-1864).

Before the María Luisa Park was donated to the Sevillian capital in 1893, the recreational field of its inhabitants was the Guadaíra riverbank and especially Alcalá. The construction of the railway that linked the town with the capital in 1873 had encouraged hiking, which was previously done preferably by boat along the river. Among the most frequent walkers in the open air were the realistic painters of the mid-nineteenth century. The concentration of landscapers eager for emotions au plein air in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, would result in a rich gallery of river themes.

Pictorial sites
One of the distinctive (and somewhat surprising) aspects of the landscape production of the Guadaíra school is the imbalance between the abundant painted work and the scarcity of available pictorial sites, which results in the representation of the same motif infinitely times for different painters (and sometimes for only one of them).

The main environments and themes represented were:

Bitter Pit and the shallow Sierra de Esparteros.
The vergeles of the aquifer of “Las Calcarenitas”.
The mills of Alcalá and the valley of Carmona: forty in the sixteenth century and thirty still active in the nineteenth century.
The romantic temptation of the Alcazar of Alcala de Guadaíra.
The pine forests and corners of the Oromana, a place for walkers and fishermen that since 2012 is a Natural Monument.

American market
Curiously, his work had no way out in the rancid Andalusian Andalusian society of the time, more attached to the traditional genre in the popular and historical in the official. The painter José Pinelo, a colleague and disciple of Sánchez Perrier, was often a dealer in the Alcalareño circle, organizing exhibitions in Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil and the USA. UU. Many of those paintings have been reimported later by Spanish collectors, such as Mariano Bellver.

In 2002, organized by the Diputación de Sevilla and coordinated by Fernández Lacomba, the retrospective exhibition “The School of Alcalá de Guadaíra and the Sevillian landscaping. 1800-1936” was presented.

Participants
José Jiménez Aranda (1837-1903)
José Lafita y Blanco (1852-1925) He lived in Alcalá between 1894 and 1898.
Emilio Sánchez Perrier (1855-1907)
José Arpa Perea (1858-1952)
José Pinelo Llull (1861-1922) Panoramic view of Alcalá and the castle from the hill of San Roque (1885).
Manuel García Rodríguez (1863-1925)
Felipe Gil Gallango (1863-1938)
José Rico Cejudo (1864-1939)
Nicolás Alperiz (1865-1928)
Javier Winthuysen Losada (1874-1956)
Manuel Villalobos Díaz (1875-)
Some sources include in this school some painters whose participation was sporadic, marginal or brief, including their supposed inspiration, Manuel Ussel de Guimbarda (1833-1907), or representatives of Andalusian regionalist painting such as Gonzalo Bilbao (Molino de Alcalá – 1885- MBASevilla), José García Ramos (Wagtails on a quiet stretch of the river (Molino de Benarosa) -1885- (Christie’s, July 8, 2011; London), Fernando Tirado or Francisco Hohenleiter.