Fundación MAPFRE is presenting the exhibition Raimundo de Madrazo, the first great retrospective dedicated to the painter in Madrid, whose goal is to recover, through around one hundred of his most significant works, the artistic language and oeuvre of one of the most cosmopolitan painters of his time.

Raimundo de Madrazo was one of the most outstanding members of the prestigious saga of painters that played such a major role in nineteenth-century Spanish art. Belonging to the family’s third generation, he devoted himself mostly to depictions of everyday scenes, while also working in portraiture, the genre in which the family had excelled.

Throughout his career Madrazo consolidated his reputation as a fashionable portraitist of high society in Paris, the city where he lived almost all his life. Within that genre, he specialised above all in female portraits, as in Portrait of a Lady, an excellent example of the artist’s expressive power, clearly continuing the style of his father and master Federico de Madrazo (1815-1894). Imbued with the exquisite refinement characteristic of this artist, the portrait transmits a feeling of spontaneous naturalness that derives from an interesting compositional study complemented with the treatment of light and analysis of colour.