Study of Marabou storks

1873 - 1874. Oil on panel.
Not on display

This is a rather interesting piece of art, most probably produced in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, the city where the artist lived since 1862. Rico’s curiosity in a wide array of animals – well-documented in the drawing notebooks that the Museo del Prado keeps – brought him to perform this outstanding study with eight different postures. The one in the right, for example, seen from its back, seems to correspond to another bird species. All of them show his sharp ability to observe from life, give an account of his ease and resolve before the motif, and demonstrate a refined perception of tonality that, in this case, is quite interesting because different proofs of blues, sky-blue, cerulean and zinc appear related to handwritten inscriptions by the artist: ‘zing’ ‘y’ ‘Celeste’ ‘Zing" ‘ceruleon’.

The study is closely related to three drawings depicting the same animal in sheet No. 59 of one of the painter’s notebooks acquired by the Prado in 2007: No. 6 (D7367). Since this notebook was purchased in Venice during the artist’s first trip to said city, as appears in the label of the house in which he bought it, such drawings must have been completed in Paris during Autumn 1873 or 1874.

Rico shared the admiration of this exotic bird with his close friend Mariano Fortuny, who included a Marabou stork in each of the two versions of the Snake Charmers (The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and The Pushkin Museum in Moscow) in 1869. Several drawings of storks by Fortuny are known, one of them in a drawing notebook acquired by the Prado (D9065) and others in the Louvre and the MNAC. In addition, a reference to a watercolour with that motif in the posthumous sale of Drouot (No. 148) should also be considered. There is one more, a simple sketch, by Ricardo de Madrazo, Fortuny’s brother-in-law, in a letter to his father Federico dated in Rome on 5 December 1868 (Museo del Prado Archive, Madrazo Fund) which indicated the origin of the interest in this motif during a visit made by Fortuny to Florence to make sketches of a Marabou stork intended for the aforementioned painting that he was preparing at that time.