A painter of historical genre and naturalist subjects, Luis Jimenez y Aranda was a prominent participant in the dominant art movements of his day. Born in Seville, he was the younger brother of painter José Jiménez y Aranda, whose meticulously rendered historical genre paintings greatly influenced the young Luis.
After completing his studies at Seville’s Academy of Fine Arts, he moved for a brief period to Madrid, where he studied the Spanish masters on display in the Prado. In 1867, the 22 year-old painter went with José Villegas and Francisco Peralta del Campo to Rome, where he worked among the Spanish painters there for the next nine years, focusing his painting on subjects set in elegant 18th-century interiors or gardens.
In 1874, Jiménez traveled to Paris to get in touch with the dealers Reitlinger and Goupil. His success during this trip prompted him to move to Paris in 1876, where he established a studio on the rue Boissonade which quickly became a meeting place for Spanish artists in France. He began exhibiting at the Paris Salon the following year. Soon the emerging Naturalist movement in Paris captured Luis’s interest, appealing to his sense of social realities and interest in natural visual effects.
By the 1880s, Jiménez was painting almost exclusively in a Naturalist manner, composing peasant subjects using naturalistic light and atmospheric effects. His works of this period brought the painter immense success, culminating at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, where he won a gold medal for his painting A Hospital-Ward during Doctor’s Rounds.
