Raimundo de Madrazo

RAIMUNDO DE MADRAZO Y GARRETA (Rome, 1841 – Versailles, 1920).
"Portrait of a Young Man."
Oil on canvas.
Signed and inscribed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 61 x 53 cm; 75 x 68 cm (frame).
In this work, the young woman’s oval, pearly face stands out as the sole source of the painting’s luminosity. As in the rest of Raimundo de Madrazo’s body of work, the artist emphasizes the subject’s personality, conducting a psychological study of the model and portraying her with great distinction and tenderness.
The son of Federico de Madrazo, Raimundo was taught by his father and his grandfather, José de Madrazo y Agudo. He also studied at the Higher School of Painting and Sculpture in Madrid, where his teachers included Carlos Luis de Ribera and Carlos de Haes. In 1860, he participated in the Universal Exposition in Paris, and two years later he settled in that city, where he attended the studio of Léon Cogniet and also took courses at the School of Fine Arts and the Imperial School of Drawing. Madrazo would spend most of his life in Paris, where he married and became a leading figure among the Spanish painters living there. Around this time, he received his first major commission: the decoration of Queen María Cristina’s Parisian palace with the painting “The Cortes of 1834,” completed in 1865. He soon became one of the favorite painters in Parisian high-society circles, particularly because of his skill in portraiture. His portraits are characterized by aristocratic elegance, very soft modeling, and sketched backgrounds executed with a loose hand, as demonstrated by works such as “Doña Josefa Manzanedo e Intentas de Mitjans, Marquise of Manzanedo” (1875) and “Ramón de Errazu” (1879), both now in the Prado Museum. As a portraitist, he was one of the finest of his generation, a worthy successor to his father and the creator of a style characterized by meticulous and elegant realism—at times frivolous but executed with an irresistible decorative instinct, which was key to his success among the bourgeoisie of his time— always with absolute mastery of pictorial techniques and an enormously refined chromatic delicacy. Raimundo de Madrazo also cultivated the genre of genre painting so much in vogue at the time—works of outstanding decorative quality, at times reminiscent of his brother-in-law Mariano Fortuny, with whom he painted in 1868 and 1872, the latter year in Granada. Raimundo de Madrazo also participated in official exhibitions, both of fine arts and of other kinds, and at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair he was awarded the first medal and honored with the title of Officer of the Legion of Honor. However, he never felt the need to participate in the National Fine Arts Exhibitions in Madrid, as from a very young age he enjoyed enormous prestige, backed not only by his surname but especially by his extraordinary talent for painting. A cosmopolitan artist, he traveled to Rome and London and, beginning in the last decade of the 19th century, to the United States and Argentina, countries where his work was highly acclaimed. The creator of historical canvases such as “Cortes de 1834,” which he painted for the Parisian palace of Queen María Cristina de Borbón, he produced numerous interior paintings and genre scenes intended for the international market, and in his youth he decorated the facades of Madrid’s Las Calatravas Church with frescoes—paintings that are now virtually lost.