RAIMUNDO DE MADRAZO Y GARRETA (Rome, 1841 - Versailles,... Lot 61

RAIMUNDO DE MADRAZO Y GARRETA (Rome, 1841 - Versailles, 1920). Untitled, c. 1860-1865. Oil on canvas. Signed in the lower left corner. Size: 73,5 x 59,5 cm. In this work the oval and pearly face of the young woman stands out as the only element of the luminosity of the piece. A portrait in which, as in the rest of Raimundo de Madrazo's production, the author emphasises the personality of the protagonist, carrying out a psychological study of the model, in which he shows the woman with great distinction and gentleness. He applies a short, precise brushstroke to the drawing, a drawing that shows a great influence of the style of his father Federico de Madrazo, a common feature in the artist's early period, who in his youth, the period to which this work belongs, followed his father's models established in portraits such as that of Doña Leocadia de Zamora or that of the Countess of Vilches, now in the collection of the Prado Museum. The son of Federico de Madrazo, Raimundo was taught by his father and grandfather, José de Madrazo y Agudo. He also studied at the Madrid School of Painting and Sculpture, where his teachers were Carlos Luis de Ribera and Carlos de Haes. In 1860 he took part in the Universal Exhibition in Paris and two years later settled in that city, where he attended the studio of Léon Cogniet and also attended courses at the School of Fine Arts and the Imperial School of Drawing. Madrazo spent most of his life in Paris, where he married and became a leading figure in the school of Spanish painters established there. Around this time he undertook his first major commission, the decoration of the Parisian palace of Queen Maria Christina with the painting "Las Cortes de 1834", which was completed in 1865. He soon became one of the favourite painters of upper-class Parisian circles, particularly because of his gift for portraiture. His portraits were of aristocratic elegance, very soft modelling and sketchy backgrounds, loosely executed, as can be seen in works such as "Doña Josefa Manzanedo e Intentas de Mitjans, Marquise de Manzanedo" (1875) and "Ramón de Errazu" (1879), both now in the Museo del Prado. As a portraitist he was one of the best of his generation, a worthy successor to his father and the author of a style of meticulous, elegant realism, sometimes frivolous but resolved with an irresistible decorative instinct, the key to his success among the bourgeoisie of his time, always with an absolute mastery of pictorial resources and an enormously refined chromatic delicacy. Raimundo de Madrazo also cultivated the genre of genre of customs, so much in vogue at the time, a painting of reigning decorative qualities, sometimes close to his brother-in-law Mariano Fortuny, with whom he painted in 1868 and 1872, the latter year in Granada. Raimundo de Madrazo also took part in official exhibitions, both of fine art and of other types, and at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889 he was awarded the first medal and honoured with the appointment of officer of the Legion of Honour. However, it was never necessary for him to take part in the National Exhibitions of Fine Arts in Madrid, as from a very early age he enjoyed enormous prestige backed not only by his surname but especially by his extraordinary talent for painting. A cosmopolitan artist, he travelled to Rome and London and, from the last decade of the 19th century onwards, to the United States and Argentina, countries where his work was highly acclaimed. The author of historical canvases such as "Cortes de 1834", which he painted for the Parisian palace of Queen María Cristina de Borbón, he produced numerous works of interiors and genre scenes for the international market, and in his youth he decorated in fresco the façades of the Madrid church of Las Calatravas, paintings that are now practically lost.