Elisa Tapia y Parrella
1876. Oil on canvas.On display elsewhere
The artist portrayed her bust-length against a light background. She seems to be around thirty-eight years old. She wears a white lace dress and a branchy bodice and she covers herself with a chiffon shawl. Her hair is tied back and braided into a high bun, which is adorned with a flower, falling into little curls around her neck and forehead.
A lady of the Parrella family, she belonged to the circle of friends of Federico de Madrazo, who would portray various of its members. Elisa y Tapia Parrella was married to the banker and politician Adolfo Bayo, the Council of the Bank of Spain.
This canvas depicts one of the portrait prototypes that Federico de Madrazo used most frequently from the 1860s onwards. Indeed, oval portraits, bust-length and without hands, are especially common in the painter’s work during this period, in which there are evident aesthetic concessions to the emerging art of photography.
In this case, the portrait had a clear tonality, with the figure bathed in a practically uniform luminosity, and a very thin pictorial matter. These effects allowed Madrazo to take full advantage of the transparencies of the chiffon or the sfumato of the flesh tones. Therefore, the artist emphasised the delicacy of her small mouth and the intensity of her large, deep eyes in the whiteness of the lady´s face.
Díez, José Luis, Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz (1815-1894), Madrazo, Museo Nacional del Prado, 1994, p.334 nº82; 454-455 nº317
