Evaristo Valle started painting in Puerto Rico in 1883 under the guidance of his father, a Supreme Court judge on the island who had studied art at the Oviedo School of Drawing. He lived in Paris on three separate occasions between 1898 and 1911, educating himself in the styles of Post-Impressionism, modernism, symbolism and pre-Expressionism. These influences, though later augmented by others, would remain in his work until the end of his life. In 1911 an attack of agoraphobia sent him into seclusion in Gijón, where he spent the rest of the 1910s creating a personal reworking of European avant-garde trends. Between 1920 and 1930 his tendency towards documentary observation and intensely local motifs and humble people turned his work into the pictorial exaltation of Asturias, within the premises of European Post-Expressionism.

Vagabonds is a product of this creative period, painted by the artist around 1922 and exhibited in June of that same year at the Palace of Libraries and National Museums in Madrid. The show, organised by art critic José Francés (Madrid, 1883–1964), was Valle's third solo exhibition in Madrid, following the ones in 1909 and 1919, and concluded with a tribute from the artistic and literary intelligentsia of the day.

In this canvas—recorded at three different stages in photographs held at Fundación Museo Evaristo Valle in Gijón—five characters are resting among traces of a muria or ruins. These scenes, in which social outsiders become the central and sole protagonists, no longer mere foils to the bourgeoisie or more or less prosperous country folk, appeared in the final years of the 1910s. However, we should not forget that Evaristo had already depicted "Apache" underworld types in Paris. In addition to being a theme in its own right, the portrayal of misery distinguished Valle's painting from the rest of Spanish art in the eyes of English-speaking critics when his solo shows opened in London (1924) and New York (1928), and it underlay all of the subjects he painted during this period. In this respect, the vagabonds could be interpreted as the degeneration of peasant or seafaring characters, marked by hunger and want.

The lack of emphasis on the scene's tragic aspect is undoubtedly owing to the dichotomy perceptible in the treatment of landscape and figures. The Post-Expressionist resolution of the background elements with a range of cold colours applied in thin, polished layers attenuates the expressive and sometimes grotesque pathos of the human figures, defined by contour lines. The grey and brown tones of their clothing contrast with the intense greens illuminated by light filtering through the clouds.

Vagabonds, beggars and loiterers continued to populate Valle's works until the end of his life, although his final pictorial period, between 1938 and 1951, was characterised by a marked deterioration of his characters. [Gretel Piquer Viniegra]