An outstanding painter of historical scenes and of secular mural decorations to adorn numerous public buildings, as well as those belonging to fin de siècle high society, Emilio Sala also dedicated much of his career to portraiture. This was an especially comfortable genre for him, as it allowed him to exercise his fluid technique as well as an expressive freedom that foreshadows many aspects of modern portraiture from the Valencian school. This new way of interpreting portraiture is even visible in his early works, of which this likeness of young María Guerrero (1868-1928) is an outstanding example. It was the artist’s gift to her father, to whom it is also dedicated, and it shows her long before she became the most venerated actress on the Spanish stage of her time.

Sala painted her at the age of ten, wearing a blue suit with white cuffs and edging. She sits on a chair with her white-booted feet resting on a velvet cushion. Her serious and somewhat tired posture and the way she rests her chin on her hand seem to reflect her boredom at such a heavy pose. Despite her young age, her face already reflects the characteristic features of her peculiar physiognomy, which grew stronger as she grew up and became one of the fundamental interpretive elements for her dramatic expression as an actress.

This portrait’s frank execution, with large areas of color and straight, broken contours that shape her figure, as well as the gradation of the palette, immediately recall Rosales’s art. Its very free and generous use of paint became more concrete and was accompanied by greater concessions to decorative considerations in Sala’s later portraits, reflecting the influence of French bourgeois portraiture after he settled in Paris. The Museo del Prado also has outstanding examples of those later works, including Portrait of a Lady (P7546), which he painted at the height of the Belle Époque (Text drawn from Díez, J. L.: El siglo XIX en el Prado, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007, pp. 352-354).