Raimundo de Madrazo was one of the most outstanding members of the prestigious saga of painters that played such a major role in nineteenth-century Spanish art. Belonging to the family’s third generation, he devoted himself mostly to depictions of everyday scenes, while also working in portraiture, the genre in which the family had excelled.

Throughout his career Madrazo consolidated his reputation as a fashionable portraitist of high society in Paris, the city where he lived almost all his life. This activity allowed him to establish contacts with the European bourgeoisie based in the French capital and to accrue a considerable clientele. Within that genre, he specialised above all in female portraits, as in the work in hand, an excellent example of the artist’s expressive power, clearly continuing the style of his father and master Federico de Madrazo (1815-1894).

Probably painted in the artist’s mature period, the work shows some of the changes Madrazo adopted in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The model—undoubtedly a commission, but it has been impossible to gather information which could help us to identify her—is an elegant lady with a look very much in tune with the fin-de-siècle atmosphere of Paris. Her attire reveals a clear intention to convey the everyday nature of the moment, evincing how Madrazo was leaving behind the eighteenth-century inspiration of his earlier works to embrace the depiction of women at the turn of the century.

Imbued with the exquisite refinement characteristic of this artist, the portrait transmits a feeling of spontaneous naturalness that derives from an interesting compositional study complemented with the treatment of light and analysis of colour. The direct light that falls on the sitter softly models her figure and highlights her face, which was painted, as if it were pieces of jewellery, in more detail and more meticulously than the rest of the painting, done with a looser hand, indicating a freer and more modern technical execution.