Fortuny, Madrazo and Rico: The Ramón de Errazu Bequest

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Exhibition

Fortuny, Madrazo and Rico: The Ramón de Errazu Bequest

Madrid 12/13/2005 - 3/12/2006

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Prado’s reception of the bequest made by Ramón de Errazu (San Luis Potosí, Mexico, 1840–Paris, 1904), a wealthy businessman who settled in Paris in the final third of the nineteenth century and assembled a painting collection that reflects the upper-middle-class tastes of his time. The twenty-five works in the bequest are a testament to his collecting acumen as they form a very homogeneous set dominated by Fortuny, Rico and Madrazo, three of the finest artists of that era who also happened to be close friends of Errazu.

The exhibition has been organised to commemorate the arrival at the Museo del Prado of this important group of artworks, one of the most representative of the museum’s modern collections.

At the heart of the bequest—and consequently of this show—are ten works by Mariano Fortuny (1838–1874), including the outstanding Nude Boy on the Beach at Porcini, a brilliant study of child anatomy amid glints of dancing sunlight and multihued shadows and a masterpiece that embodies the quintessence of the master’s final creative period. Another important example of the painter’s undeniable talent is Nude Old Man in the Sun, a torso that Fortuny connected to eighteenth-century Spanish tradition.

Fortuny’s innovative ability to capture light, particularly in his later work, soon made him the champion of a style that would inspire Martín Rico (1833–1908) and Raimundo de Madrazo (1841–1920), the other two painters most present in this exhibition, with four works by Rico and nine by Madrazo. One of the most remarkable pieces by Madrazo, who was also Fortuny’s brother-in-law, is a likeness of the collector himself, a close personal friend. This Portrait of Ramón de Errazu (1879), in which the painter drew inspiration from Velázquez to capture Errazu’s elegant demeanour in a distinctively modern way, may be Madrazo’s greatest achievement in this genre.

Finally, the group includes one of the most famous and controversial nudes painted in late nineteenth-century Paris—The Pearl and the Wave by Paul Baudry (1828–1886), once owned by Empress Eugénie de Montijo, with whom Errazu was also acquainted—and a Portrait of the Marchioness of Manzanedo, the collector’s close personal friend, by one of the most renowned painters of his time, Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891). Ramón de Errazu knew both French painters well, and they were close to Madrazo and Fortuny’s circle.

The exhibition, organised to celebrate the centenary of the arrival of Ramón de Errazu’s collection at the Museo del Prado, presents the twenty-five paintings bequeathed by the collector, several of which are considered some of the Prado’s finest nineteenth-century masterpieces. The group consists of twenty oil paintings and five watercolours painted between 1862 and 1895, mostly by the leading Spanish artists of the day—Mariano Fortuny, Martín Rico and Raimundo de Madrazo, all Errazu’s contemporaries and friends—with the exception of two by renowned painters of the Second French Empire, Ernest Meissonier and Paul Baudry.

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Commented works: The Pearl and the Wave</em>, Paul Baudry (1862) — **Video**
Commented works: The Pearl and the Wave, Paul Baudry (1862)

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Exhibition

Mariano Fortuny (1838-1874)

Fortuny was the most international Spanish artist of the entire nineteenth century and the unrivalled European master of refined, detailed cabinet painting. His art was instrumental in popularising anecdotal genre scenes, and his sphere of influence extended to a vast number of disciples, followers and imitators. The young Fortuny’s first steps as an artist were guided by his paternal grandfather, a wax sculptor and woodcarver.

In 1852, he went to Barcelona to enrol at the Llotja school, where he studied under the Nazarene master Claudio Lorenzale. A grant sent him to Rome, a city that proved decisive for the rest of his artistic career, as he made countless drawings and was introduced to the large community of Spanish artists living there. In 1860, the Provincial Council of Barcelona sent him to North Africa to visually chronicle the Hispano-Moroccan War. While there, he made sketches for The Battle of Wad-Ras (Madrid, Museo del Prado) and developed a lifelong fascination with the Arab world. After returning to Italy, he opened a new studio in Via Flaminia, where the obvious brilliance and mastery of his paintings brought him international fame and prestige. He married Cecilia de Madrazo, daughter of the great Federico de Madrazo, in Madrid in 1867 and was drawn into the circle of his brother-in-law Raimundo de Madrazo. That same year he produced one of his greatest masterpieces, The Vicarage (Barcelona, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya), which was an enormous success from the moment it first went on display.

He travelled to new places in those years and visited Seville and Granada, exploring the latter city with two of his closest friends: the landscape artist Martín Rico and Joaquín Agrasot. After spending a period in Portici, he contracted malaria, a disease that was ultimately responsible for his untimely death in Rome in 1874.

Raimundo Madrazo (1841-1920)

Born in Rome, Raimundo was a disciple of his father Federico and his grandfather José de Madrazo, but he also attended the Academia de San Fernando, where his teachers included Carlos Luis de Ribera and Carlos de Haes. He moved to Paris in 1860 and studied under Leon Coignet. He took part in a world’s fair but never needed to participate in the National Fine Arts Exhibitions in Madrid, as his reputation was made from an early age thanks to his illustrious surname and exquisite technique.

Above all, Raimundo de Madrazo is considered one of the most talented portraitists of his generation and a worthy successor to his father Federico, with a more detailed, elegant, occasionally frivolous realism that made him immensely popular with the bourgeois buyers of his day.

Always displaying an absolute command of pictorial resources and a highly refined, delicate use of colour, Madrazo’s oeuvre was also much admired in France, where he won a first-place medal and was inducted into the Legion of Honour for his participation in the 1889 Paris Exposition.

Martín Rico (1833-1908)

A landscape artist born in El Escorial, Madrid, Martín Rico attended the Liceo Artístico y Literario from the age of twelve and later studied under the painter Vicente Camarón, who introduced him to the landscape genre. Brother of the engraver Bernardo Rico, he studied at the Academia de San Fernando and participated in several National Fine Arts Exhibitions between 1858 and 1867, with considerable success.

After receiving a government grant to study abroad, in 1859 he went to Paris, where his works appeared in several salons. He returned to Spain when the Franco-Prussian War broke out and, after several months in Madrid, moved to Granada, where he met Fortuny. From that moment on, his work was powerfully influenced by the Catalan master, whom he accompanied on a tour around Italy, where he found Venice particularly fascinating. He and Raimundo de Madrazo arranged the installation of the Fortuny room at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Towards the end of his life, Rico published an autobiography, written at the recommendation of the great landscape painter Aureliano Beruete.
He is considered the most important of the Spanish landscape painters who followed in Fortuny’s painstakingly detailed footsteps. After an early realistic period clearly influenced by the Barbizon School, he gradually developed a highly refined technique thanks to his extraordinary talent for precise draughtsmanship and impassioned vision of colour, which were perfectly suited to the prevailing tastes of that era, especially his countless panoramic views of the city of Venice.

Ramón de Errazu (1840-1904)

Famed in his lifetime as a wealthy landowner and art lover but little-known today, Ramón de Errazu y Rubio de Tejada was born into a family of great Spanish entrepreneurs who originally hailed from the Basque Country but made their fortune in Mexico.

Ramón de Errazu came into this world on 28 July 1840 in San Luis de Potosí, Mexico, where his father had settled after becoming involved in the businesses started by his own father, Cayetano Rubio. Ramón’s grandfather Cayetano was one of the founders of the Mexican textile and salt industries and the family’s first patron of the arts.

Ramón’s father, an equally prosperous businessman, had settled down in San Luis de Potosí, the Mexican city where his son was born, but when Ramón was twelve, he decided to move to Paris. There, Ramón adopted the customs of the highest social echelons and quickly acquired the refined tastes that would characterise his pastimes and particularly his attire.

He was involved in the family business from a very young age, constantly travelling to Mexico to help consolidate the salt industry there. However, he spent most of his time in Paris, where he moved in elite circles among the wealthiest Latin American residents in the French capital. As was the fashion in bourgeois society, he acquired his own winery, was fond of horses and belonged to the most exclusive Parisian club of the day. He may have initially taken an interest in painting because collecting art was another sign of social distinction, but there can be little doubt that his friendship with Raimundo de Madrazo and his brother-in-law, who was also a collector, had a decisive influence on his tastes and the formation of his collection.
Ramón de Errazu died in Paris on 17 October 1904. He had named his brother Luis as sole heir and executor of his will, but when Luis died, the family fortune was scattered. In addition to Ramón de Errazu’s own portrait, the Prado owns one of an older sister, Manuela de Errazu, bequeathed by her son Joaquín Irureta Goyena and also painted by Madrazo.

The Errazu Bequest

It seems that the collector had several reasons for wanting to bequeath this remarkable set of works to the Prado. Errazu was quite familiar with the museum because he had paid multiple visits to its director, Federico de Madrazo (Raimundo’s father), and he knew the gallery did not have a work by Fortuny or any French paintings from the latter half of the nineteenth century. The bequest was also a fitting tribute to his profound connection with Spain, even though he had spent far more time living in Mexico and France. The prestige and solid reputation of the Museo del Prado may have been another factor that motivated Errazu’s decision to leave the works to this institution.

The collection was first exhibited at the Prado on 16 May 1905 in what came to be known as the Errazu Gallery (the octagonal room at the southwest corner of the Villanueva Building, now a sculpture gallery), which art journalists described as a ‘veritable shrine of modern art’.

In 1971, the works in the bequest were moved to exhibition halls in the Casón del Buen Retiro, where they mingled with the rest of the museum’s nineteenth-century paintings. Their return to the museum galleries for this new exhibition is the first time in many years that visitors are able to view them together again.

The artworks are significant in their own right, but it should also be noted that they all arrived in frames whose designs and materials had been carefully chosen and ordered from Paris by the collector himself. For example, many of the frames, including the one surrounding Nude Boy on the Beach at Porcini, are made of ebony. Another detail that illustrates Errazu’s painstaking care of his collection is the presence of bronze plates, with the artist’s name and title of each work engraved on the reverse, covering the back of every small-format piece.

Catalogue

Title: Fortuny, Madrazo and Rico: The Ramón de Errazu Bequest
Pages: 192
Measures: 28 x 23 cm
Binding: Paperback