Zuloaga’s contact with international art movements was instrumental in the decisive role he played within the generation of artists who modernised Spanish art during the changeover from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Acknowledged for his creation of a Spanish iconography in the context of the 1898 crisis, and for the popularisation outside Spain of a visual imagery associated with the so-called Black Legend, the painter was an active participant in the renewal of the visual arts in Europe.

Such was his popularity as a portraitist throughout his career that Zuloaga occasionally had to turn down commissions. This meant that he was able to select those he was truly interested it and allowed him to set aside the superfluous and concentrate on the psychology of the sitters, preferring those who played a major role in modern life.

That is the case of this work, painted in Paris, depicting the American dentist Mr Halley-Schmidt on a golf course. In those days, golf was beginning to become popular among the upper classes, with which Zuloaga would be connected throughout his career. At that time, he was very successful among American patrons, a decisive factor behind his exhibition and trip to the United States in 1925.

Portrait of Mr. Halley-Schmidt evinces Zuloaga’s characteristic approach to portrait painting: dividing the composition into different planes to create a backdrop in which to place the model, who in this case is standing to one side of the painting as if to reinforce the setting, in a highly characteristic pose in his portraits. The elegance of the attire and the affected spontaneity of the portrayed character make him a paradigm of the sportsman, an archetype highly popular throughout Europe in the late-nineteenth century but scarcely represented in Spanish portraits at the time. In turn, the palette chosen for the background landscape reveals the influence of avant-garde movements and in particular of Émile Bernard (1868-1941), a friend of Zuloaga’s.

A certain resemblance between Halley-Schmidt and Juan de Borbón led to an erroneous identification in some publications. The identity of the American dentist was eventually confirmed thanks to the archives of the painter’s family in Zumaya. The sitter must have been quite satisfied with the painting given that, years later, in 1932, the artist was also commissioned with the portrait of Miss Halley-Schmidt in Paris.