María Octavia Picón y Pardiñas
1893. Oil on canvas.On display elsewhere
In this painting, Emilio Sala portrayed María, the daughter of Jacinto Octavio Picón, as an adolescent: eleven years after painting her portrait as a child wearing a white bonnet (P006729). Hence, she must be around 15 years old in this painting. On this particular occasion, the painter dedicated the portrait to the sitter’s mother, fondly and adoringly calling her ‘mamá Octavia’, proof of the artist’s friendly relationship with the Picón family members. María is depicted half-length, in profile and with long, curly hair that she wears loose. Her face – not very good-looking – is chiselled with high cheekbones, an exaggerated nose and a protruding chin. Her gaze, directed towards the right side of the painting, maintains the honesty that she already demonstrated in her previous portrait. Furthermore, her smiling and unstressed expression reveals composure and, probably, trust in the artist who painted her. This is without question a realistic work, yet it is suffused with the author’s friendship and fondness towards the sitter. The girl is dressed in black, wearing a high-necked dress on which an oval brooch – possibly a cameo – is the only adornment she allows herself. The image is set against a lightened neutral background eluding any spatial reference in order to focus on the figure. It is rendered with thick brushstrokes in warm hues that provide luminosity to the area around the hair and the upper part of the shoulder, thus providing the head with volume and depth that is also suggested by the strong, directed light with which the painter illuminates her face. The loose yet vigorous technique is also used in her clothing, in which there are some hints of carmine colour – rather sparse, in fact – that brighten up this portrait with very few contrasting colours.
All these pictorial resources – the directed light, the use of little tonal variation, and the interest in emphasising the figure by providing it with a sculptural character – reveal Emilio Sala’s study and assimilation of 17th-century Spanish painters, especially Velázquez, whose works he most certainly knew and studied on his regular visits to the Museo del Prado. The Prado keeps some examples of the pictorial relationship between members of the Picón family and Emilio Sala dating from the 1880s and 1890s. In addition to the two abovementioned portraits of María, there are two portraits of Mrs Picón (P007585 and P007397) – dated 1883 and 1885, respectively – and a portrait of the father, Mr Jacinto Octavio Picón (P007584), painted in Paris in 1889. Also dated 1893 – the year in which this painting was completed – is Portrait of Jacinto Felipe Picón y Pardiñas, the sitter’s brother (P006070), who we know lived between 1878 to 1917. He was a lawyer and municipal prosecutor in Madrid and was subsequently elected to the Spanish Parliament to Segovia between 1907 and 1910, and to the island of El Hierro in the Canary Islands between 1914 and 1916.
Orihuela, M., María Picón y Pardiñas (1893). En Barón, J.: El retrato español en el Prado. De Goya a Sorolla, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007, p.178, n. 62
