Panneau [Panel] is representative of the mature period of Julio Romero de Torres who, after painting his large murals with feminine allegories of the Arts for the Córdoba Circle of Friendship in 1905, abandoned his early realism and embraced a symbolism which, in the decade that followed, would take on a unique, peculiar quality. This eventually culminated in the group presented in a special hall dedicated to him at the 1915 National Exhibition, including the remarkable seven panels of the polyptych Poem of Córdoba (1913, Museo Julio Romero de Torres, Córdoba).

This large painting, also known as Paisaje abierto al barandal de la ribera [Landscape Opening onto the Riverside Railing] in reference to the background scene, clearly illustrates the formal and conceptual elements that define the Córdoba-born artist's most typical output.

By this time women had become the almost exclusive protagonists of Romero de Torres's work. For his models he chose gypsies, actresses or flamenco singers whose singular beauty appealed to him. The woman portrayed here on the right appears to be María Dolores Fernández Heredia (1888-1976), known as Amalia the Gypsy, the painter's favourite model in the 1910s. He generally painted tall, slender women with black hair gathered at the nape of the neck; sometimes they were nude or semi-nude, but in many cases—here, for example—they are dressed in tight-fitting bodices and long, straight skirts, shawls, barely visible silk stockings and satin-covered heels. The sensuality they exude is offset and muted by their hieratic poses, distracted or distant expressions and melancholy gravity of their impassive faces.

As in other works from this and subsequent periods—for his painting did not change substantially once he had developed a signature style—the drawing is simple with solid contours, curving in some places and straight in others. The balanced composition leaning towards symmetry—the pillars of the frame, the women and the orange trees, with the flower vase and distant tower forming the axis—is orthogonally organised into vertical lines of figures and trees and horizontal lines in the landscape: benches, railing, river and the city skyline. The palette of green and ochre tones, muted in the landscape, is expanded in the blouse and skirt of the woman on the right and echoed in the purplish hues of the other, becoming brighter on the shoes and the three roses that find their counterpoint in the distant oranges.

The contrast between the women in the foreground and the expansive background on a much smaller scale far in the distance is characteristic of Romero de Torres, although here he did not include any of his customary tiny figures. Also typical of this period is the false frame with an opening between pilasters and the ledge on which the women and flower vase are standing. These same elements appear in the aforementioned Poem of Córdoba; the features and attitude of the woman on the right are repeated almost without variation in the panel entitled Jewish Córdoba, providing a reliable point of reference for dating this work.

The historicist handling of the frame, the composition and the arrangement of all the elements, harking back to Renaissance formulas, are used to portray modern figures and landscape—Córdoba and its women at the dawn of the 20th century—enveloping a painting of coherent form and sentiment in an aura of symbolic melancholy and timelessness. [José Manuel Cruz Valdovinos]