Raimundo de
Madrazo y Garreta

(Rome, 1841-Versailles, 1920). Spanish painter. Son of Federico de Madrazo, he was taught by his father and grandfather, José de Madrazo y Agudo, and was a student at the School of Painting and Sculpture in Madrid. In 1862 he settled in Paris, where he attended the studio of Léon Cogniet, the School of Fine Arts and the Imperial School of Drawing. As decoration of the Parisian palace of Queen Maria Cristina, he painted Las Cortes of 1834, finished in 1865. Soon he became one of the favorite painters of the circles of the great world in Paris, mainly due to his facility for the portrait, of aristocratic elegance, very soft modeling and sketchy bottoms, of loose execution, as works like the portrait of Doña Josefa Manzanedo e Intentas de Mitjans, Marquise of Manzanedo (1875) and Portrait of Ramón de Errazu (1879), both in the Prado, show. He also cultivated the painting of customs, in a painting of refined decorative qualities, sometimes close to his brother-in-law Mariano Fortuny, with whom he painted in 1868 and 1872, the latter year in Granada. In the Universal Exhibition of 1889 he obtained the first medal and the appointment of officer of the Legion of Honor. A cosmopolitan artist, he traveled to Rome and London and, from the last decade of the century, to the United States and Argentina, countries where his painting achieved great recognition. In 1904 an important group of works by the artist entered the Prado Museum, bequeathed by his friend, the collector Ramón de Errazu. The artist himself donated two works by Francisco de Goya to the Museum in 1894.