Andalusian school of the mid-19th century. Circle of ANDRÉS CORTÉS AGUILAR (Seville, 1812 - 1879). "Port View". Oil on canvas. Period frame with vivid woodworm. It presents faults. Measurements: 96 x 138 cm; 112 x 155 cm (frame). The painter offers us in this work a port view captured in the middle of the 19th century, from the bank of a river, possibly the Guadalquivir as it passes through some Andalusian city. The landscape, an ambitious composition, is populated by popular figures in different poses. Due to its stylistic and morphological characteristics, the present work can be related to the circle of Andrés Cortés Aguilar, a famous 19th-century Andalusian painter. Born to a painter father, Andrés Cortés was the author of a prolific and highly personal oeuvre, although little precise information is known about his life. His father, Antonio Cortés, lived in France and had been a pupil of the landscape painter and animal painter Constantin Troyon, which undoubtedly must have marked from his first artistic steps, which he took with his father, Andrés Cortés s preference for landscapes with herds, a genre in which he became one of the foremost specialists of his time and which defined much of his output. He also stood out as a great landscape painter of Sevillian genre painting, with works in which he was particularly influenced by the 17th-century Dutch masters, something that was common among the Sevillian landscape painters of the time. But what finally brought him recognition in the art world was his friendship with his great patron, the Basque industrialist J. M. Ybarra y Gutiérrez, the future Count of Ybarra, who commissioned numerous works from him. Cortés painted other Sevillian views of equally ambitious composition, although he was chiefly known for his rural landscapes with flocks. He also painted a number of portraits, historical subjects and religious scenes, and was an interesting type painter, of which "El tío Gamboa de Hinojos" (private collection) is a good example. Andrés Cortés is represented in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza and Bellver collections, the Romantic Museum in Madrid, the former palace of the Marqués de la Vega-Inclán, Seville Town Hall, the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga and the Museum of Art and Culture in Granada, as well as in various private collections and parish churches such as Santa María la Coronada in Cadiz and San Roque in Gibraltar.