The Genovés and the Canogar today. The Coullaut-Valera in the 20th century. The Fortuny and the Madrazo at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. They are all of them families of artists, but the Madrazo family is undoubtedly the largest and most influential.
In its leafy genealogy we will find half a dozen paintersa writer, an architect and a collector. José, Federico and Raimundo stand out among the first.
José de Madrazo y Agudo (1781-1859) was the founder of the dynasty. Chamber painter of Charles IVwas deputy director of the Academy of Fine Arts and director of the Prado Museum.
In Paris in 1801 he was a student of Jacques-Louis David and a friend of Ingres. His painting is a perfect example of neoclassical stiffness. His son, Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz (1815-1894), he also ended up being director of the Academy and the Prado.
He was also a chamber painter – for Isabel II – and even a senator. But above all it was the Spanish romantic portraitist par excellence. Whoever contemplates his effigy of the Countess of Vilches, in the Prado, will know why.
His daughter Cecilia married Mariano Fortuny, who became one of the most sought-after painters in Europe (whose son, Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo was the famous designer and set designer). Another offspring of Federico Madrazo was Raimundo Madrazo (1841-1920), to whom this exhibition is dedicated.
Readers excuse this tumult of names, but it was necessary to understand why the destiny of young Raimundo seemed to be drawn since he showed artistic aptitudes. He had his father and grandfather –and Carlos de Haes– as teachers, who assumed that he would become another official painter.
Raimundo de Madrazo: ‘Girls at the Window’, 1875. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
However, it was not like that. Raimundo, like them, barely twenty years old moved to Paris to complete your training. Instead, he never took a teacher or attended many classes at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts.
He copied in the Louvre and traveled to London to see the Universal Exhibition of 1862, where he learned about the painting of Gainsborough and Reynolds, who would influence his later portraiture, as well as Japanese fabrics and ceramicswhich would often appear as boldness in their gender paintings.
But the most notable thing is that despite his father’s insistence on directing his career, young Raimundo stood up and told him that, instead of competing in official competitions with the usual history paintings, his intention was dedicate yourself to genre painting with a kind themewhat was called tableautins.
Likewise, with more ambition, in the following years he will also make medium and large format portraits, with indisputable success on this and the other side of the Atlantic. All this, however, practicing a precious and detailed painting of idealized scenes, completely indifferent to the rise of modern artwhich took place next to him in those years (the first impressionist exhibition took place in Paris in 1874).
Raimundo de Madrazo: ‘Luisa, Rosa and Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta, children of the painter’, 1845. Photo: Luis Escobar
This places him, as the curator of the exhibition points out, among the painters of the Middle grounda term coined to refer to those who They did not practice academic painting, but neither did they practice avant-garde.
I could have started my comment from here, pointing out that this is not the first exhibition that the Mapfre Foundation has dedicated to the rescue of artists that the modern canon has left aside (Pienso en Boldini or the French academic painting).
Works that enjoyed huge acceptance at the timealthough the modern was made against the grain of that success. It is interesting to see how the current viewer reacts, how our artistic taste has ended up being constructed.
Let’s return to Raimundo de Madrazo, presented through more than one hundred works, several of them unpublished, from more than sixty collections. Many are North American, as a result of the stays he spent in that country as a successful portrait painter between 1897 and 1910.
Raimundo de Madrazo: ‘Departure from the masked ball’, 1878. Photo: Private collection
The exhibition follows a chronological course. After a complete display of his more or less obligatory attempts with historical painting – some stand out Daughters of the Cid whose ostentatious nakedness is strange to a modern gaze – we find a succession of paintings dedicated to female characters.
It is with them that in the 1870s won over the Parisian marketwhose bourgeoisie loved those representations that today we undoubtedly consider “objectifying.” Whether it is the cliché of the Andalusian woman or the French rogue dressed anachronistically as in Louis XIV’s Versailles, they are always figures of ideal beauty and resoundingly indolent.
The paintings they will evolve, emptying themselves of scenery until concentrating on the face. And an entire section is dedicated precisely to his versatile model, Aline Masson. Beginning in the 1880s, Raimundo de Madrazo abandoned genre painting to dedicate himself almost exclusively to the portrait.
Among its select clientele we find the Duchess of Alba, the Marquis of Casa Riera and Queen María Cristina. (who liked the portrait so little that she ordered it returned).
The exhibition allows us to peer into a gallant world that is reflected as an impossible ideality. Perhaps it is not very different from our selfies. It’s worth checking out.