MADRID.- The name Madrazo occupies an imposing place in the history of 19th-century Spanish art. Federico de Madrazo became one of the era's defining portraitists, while Raimundo de Madrazo achieved international success and Mariano Fortuny — connected to the family through marriage — became one of Spain's most celebrated artists abroad. Ricardo de Madrazo, however, has remained a considerably more elusive figure.
The Museo Nacional del Prado is now seeking to change that.
The Madrid museum has opened Ricardo de Madrazo (1852-1917): Drawings and Watercolors, the first exhibition devoted to the artist, bringing together sketchbooks, watercolors, drawings, personal documents and his earliest known self-portrait. Presented in Room 60 of the Villanueva Building as part of the Prado's "Open Storage" program, the exhibition remains on view through January 17, 2027.
For an artist who spent much of his life surrounded by famous painters, Madrazo left behind a remarkably personal record of his own world. His sketchbooks function almost like visual diaries, following him through Madrid, Rome, Naples, Granada, Toledo, Venice, Tangier, Fez, Biarritz and Lekeitio over the course of five decades.
The pages move easily between art and everyday life. There are preparatory studies and copies after Velázquez, Goya and El Greco, but also family portraits, street scenes, animals, studio interiors and fragments of places encountered while traveling.
That intimacy is one of the exhibition's central revelations. Rather than presenting Madrazo primarily through the shadow cast by his celebrated relatives, the Prado focuses on the media in which his individual voice emerges most clearly: drawing and watercolor.
His travels through southern Spain were particularly important. Watercolors made in Córdoba and Granada demonstrate his fascination with Islamic architecture and with the shifting effects of color and light. Among them are views of the mihrab of the Mosque of Córdoba, the Hall of the Abencerrajes at the Alhambra and the Cuesta del Rey Chico in Granada.
A trip to North Africa in 1877 opened another chapter. Madrazo filled sketchbooks in Tangier and Fez with figures, streets and scenes of daily life, adding Orientalist subjects to a visual repertoire that was already unusually broad. Some of those drawings later became the basis for finished compositions or illustrations reproduced in period publications.
His close relationship with Mariano Fortuny provides another thread through the exhibition. Madrazo began working in Fortuny's studio while still young and had an unusually intimate view of his brother-in-law's working methods. His drawings preserve not only models and objects connected with Fortuny's paintings but glimpses of the artist himself and the environments in which he worked.
One of the most historically revealing sheets is Detail of the Interior of Mariano Fortuny's Studio in Rome, made following Fortuny's death in 1874. The watercolor records the arrangement of the studio and objects from the artist's collection before they were dispersed in posthumous sales, turning what might otherwise appear to be a casual drawing into an important document of Fortuny's artistic world.
Madrazo also became an accomplished interpreter of the Old Masters. Around 1901, he produced a watercolor copy of Velázquez's The Jester Don Juan of Austria, while a group of four works after Giambattista Tiepolo records sections of the ceiling of the Throne Room at Madrid's Royal Palace.
These were not simply exercises in reproduction. By translating paintings into watercolor and drawing, Madrazo had to reconsider their composition, brushwork, color and light through a different medium. The copies reveal a close, analytical engagement with the artists he admired.
Yet some of the most appealing material is far removed from the grandeur of Velázquez or Tiepolo. Madrazo drew his children, a dog resting in Lekeitio, relatives and friends, objects kept in studios and scenes encountered during journeys. Taken together, the sketchbooks suggest an artist for whom drawing was not simply preparation for finished works but a way of recording experience.
He was also an important custodian of the Madrazo family's history. Ricardo inherited a substantial portion of the family archive from his father Federico and preserved it intact. The exhibition includes his diary from 1894 and a letter sent to his father from Toledo around 1875, both acquired by the Prado in 2012.
A portrait of the young Ricardo made by Italian artist Scipione Vannutelli in 1866 adds another dimension. Acquired by the Prado in 2025, it is the first work by Vannutelli to enter the museum's collection and shows Ricardo at the beginning of a life immersed in one of Spain's most influential artistic dynasties.
The exhibition is also the culmination of two decades of collecting by the Prado. Between 2006 and 2026, the museum assembled 29 Madrazo sketchbooks, now the second-largest group of sketchbooks by a single artist in its holdings, exceeded only by its collection of 40 by Martín Rico.
Many of the works are being shown publicly for the first time.
That fact makes the exhibition as much an act of rediscovery as a retrospective. Ricardo de Madrazo may never have achieved the international fame of Fortuny or Raimundo, but the drawings gathered by the Prado reveal a skilled and observant artist whose career intersected with some of the most important artistic personalities, places and traditions of 19th-century Spain.
More importantly, they allow viewers to encounter him on his own terms — not simply as another member of the Madrazo family, but as an artist who turned drawing into a record of travel, friendship, family life and the world immediately around him.
Ricardo de Madrazo (1852-1917): Drawings and Watercolors is on view in Room 60 of the Museo Nacional del Prado's Villanueva Building in Madrid through January 17, 2027.
