Aureliano de Beruete was the most prominent landscape artist of his generation. He would select the settings for his paintings with great care and often featured the Sierra de Guadarrama, which was the subject of numerous works by him, including The wall of El Pardo (P4243). He likewise paid significant attention to capturing what was characteristic of the deep historical roots of the old cities of Castile, as well as the most authentically popular traditions represented in the suburbs of Madrid. In these works he demonstrated the naturalistic interest that made him the most assiduous twentiethcentury landscape painter of Madrid´s outlying areas, a subject that frequently appeared in the works of some of the writers of the Generation of 1898 during those years.The outskirts of Madrid were, at that time, undergoing substantial transformations due to the growth in the city´s population. Such is the case with the district of Bellas Vistas, situated to the west of Madrid along the highway to France, which comprised, for the most part, single-storey houses inhabited by rag merchants and brickmakers, as well as numerous taverns. Though the artist lived in the centre of the Spanish capital, he always avoided painting its bourgeois streets, for he was more interested in locales that presented particularly vivid examples of apparently spontaneous dwellings adapted to the accidents of topography -the varying dips and rises in the land outside the city.This grouping of houses is populated by tiny figures- barely smudges of colour yet executed precisely enough to give the impression they are women and children, as in the group on the right. The artist had learned from Martín Rico, a painter Beruete had worked with in his youth, how to animate his landscapes with human figures, which are, in Beruete´s case, even smaller than Rico´s. Painted outdoors in a winter´s noonday light, the work presents a delicate arrangement of soft green, ochre, orange and grey tones, with which the artist creates a sense of harmony in his interpretation of this otherwise apparently unlovely area - clearly a poor, marginal suburb of the capital. The artist seems to rescue this place from its miserable condition through his straightforward analysis of light and colour, executed in a rich palette refined in its nuances.In this lucid vision of daily reality, the architecture seems to be the true protagonist. The simple volumes and the bare walls are built up with small patches of colour that make apparent Beruete´s familiarity with the Impressionists´ use of colour: based on careful, painstaking observation in situ. Yet the artist also followed his own intuition in the execution of this work by not subjecting the scene to a coldly analytical process, instead endowing it with a certain balanced naturalness, which was characteristic of his painting.The work was donated to the Prado in 1913 by the artist´s son, named after his father Aureliano de Beruete y Moret, a prominent art historian who years later became the Prado´s director (Barón, J.: Portrait of Spain. Masterpieces from the Prado, Queensland Art Gallery-Art Exhibitions Australia, 2012, p. 246).