While Beruete’s landscapes are generally wide and open, he occasionally painted more secluded ones, like this bend in the Manzanares River on the outskirts of Madrid. This is not a rigorous wooded landscape, as it is somewhat more capacious, but the closeness of the river’s water around the ridge bearing the tree in the foreground is striking.

During this final period of the artist’s life, he employed a different technique than before, with thick impastos of pure color that bring an intense luminous vibrancy to the landscape. The golden tones of the trees’ autumn leaves is reflected here in the band of dense foliage. Aureliano de Beruete reserved this time of year for his most intense pictorial campaigns, shortly after returning from his Summer travels around Europe.

This work is closely related to another Manzanares Landscape that is dated the same year in Madrid. The vigorous brushstrokes that become very tight and dense in the middle ground are visibly wavy in the foreground, where they very appropriately depict the water rippling in the wind, and Beruete used the same technique that year to represent the Júcar River during a campaign in Cuenca.

The small waterwheel on the bank of the river would have raised water for the building project on the right. The river itself is intensely colored with violets, oranges, greens and mauves. The fine quality of the pigments used by this artist has kept them from cracking or growing darker -especially the strong white impastos applied with a palette knife. Beruete’s intense vision reaches its apex in this landscape as the different areas blend together, making it barely possible to distinguish the profiles and edges of the objects represented. The brilliant colors, confident touch and skillful rendering of the different surfaces -especially the water and the masses of trees- make this one of the most interesting works from the final months of the artist’s life (Text drawn from Barón, J.: El siglo XIX en el Prado, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007, pp. 382-383).