raimundo madrazo y garetta
TRANSCRIPT
Young Lady
with a Mask and
Glass of
Absinthe
FOND MEMORI
ES
Aline sosteniendo un
sombrero
Portrait of a young girl in pink dress
Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta
1841-1920 Spanish Son of Federico de Madrazo y Kentz. Because of his ability and training with his father, Federico, in the Real Academia de S Fernando in Madrid and with Leon Cogniet in Paris, he seemed
destined to continue the family tradition of academic painting. However, due to the influence of the Belgian Alfred Stevens, of his brother-in-law, Mariano Jose Bernardo Fortuny y Marsal, and the
Parisian environment, he exchanged dry historical painting for the preciousness of the tableautin, the small, intimate genre painting. He
lived in Paris and New York and became so remote from Spanish artistic life that he and Fortuny y Marsal were the only Spanish artists not to participate in any national exhibition, and because of this the
Spanish state never directly acquired their works. In 1882, with Giuseppe De Nittis, Stevens and the gallery owner Georges Petit, he co-founded the Exposition Internationale de Peinture, designed to
promote foreign artists in Paris. Madrazo Garreta most characteristic works are the female portrait and the witty and elegant genre
painting, with soft, delicate tones and suggestive poses. The influence of the Rococo and of Japanese art is reflected in his painting, which
expresses an exquisite aristocratic or bourgeois ideal, the illusion of a refined, sensual and superficial life. Consequently, his works are also described as representing the Parisian seraglio. American collectors
paid high prices for his paintings, for example Alexander Turney Stewart bought Lady with a Parrot; Carnival Festival (1878) was
purchased by L. Wolfe; and Girls at the Window (1875) was bought by J. W. Vanderbilt, the last two now being in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York. His portraits were better received in Spain although because of collectors such as Ramen de Errazu (d 1909), the Museo del Prado has a good number of his paintings (e.g. After the Bath).