3-098-952 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Flower stall, 1887. De la Riva, who did not usually include human figures in her compositions, paints a flower seller posing before her abundant wares. The inclusion of the woman allowed the artist to draw attention to the modest jobs to which non-professional women in need of money were relegated. This canvas is perhaps the most ambitious composition by one of the most publicly acclaimed female painters in 19th-century Spain. Specializing in flower painting, De la Riva fought tirelessly to achieve fame, eventually establishing herself as an artist independently from her husband, the painter Domingo Muñoz Cuesta. Despite her successful career, she was sometimes still treated as an amateur. This places her among the key figures in the first major period of professionalization for women painters on the Iberian Peninsula. Flower Stall was surely the first work she exhibited in Paris, at the Salon of 1885, by which time she already had Simonson as her art dealer in the French capital.