RAIMUNDO DE MADRAZO Y GARRETA

Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta was born in Rome in 1841 in a family of famous painters. His grandfather Jose and his father Federico were famous artists of high prestige and later he became a brother-in-law of one of the most important painters of the 19th century Spain, Mariano Fortuny. This solid familial basis allowed him to turn into one of the bulwarks of the so-called bourgeois realism which development acquired the central and determining role. His first studies in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid and his later studies in Paris with Leon Coignet brought severe but correct academic touches into his early works.  A traveler and a cosmopolite with good connections with professionals, he never sent a single work to the national exhibitions, but together with Giuseppe de Nittis, his Belgian friend Alfred Stevens, and a gallery keeper George Petit he staged the International Exhibition of Painting which aim was to promote the foreign art in the real artistic capital of the fin de siècle: Paris. After the first attempts in the academic style he turned to the more decorative and fresh painting continuing in a certain sense his brother-in-law Fortuny’s tradition

with the refined realism transferred to the canvas through a subtle and elaborate colour spectrum that reached the heights of mastery in the works inspired by his model and lover Aline Masson, combining tender feelings and the primacy of the execution. He was notable for the portraits, making this genre one of his favorite ones; it was not in vain that his father was a great portrait painter who taught Raimundo, and the latter added a personal touch to the elegant French portrait of the Second Imperium that, in the long run, had its roots in the English portrait painting of the previous century.

Scene with Frock Coats