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Martín Rico is one of the great 19th-century Spanish landscape painters.
He is a little known artist today as he has never been the subject of an individual exhibition
and this one at the Prado is the first to be devoted to him, either during his lifetime or after.
It features 101 works, among them all of Rico’s masterpieces,
in addition to his notebooks, which were acquired by the Museum in 2007
and which provide an idea of his artistic personality,
from the start of his career in 1853 to his death in 1908.
The exhibition has been structured into sections that cover the different phases in Rico’s career.
The first one focuses on his early years, starting with his training with Genaro Pérez Villaamil
when he worked within the Romantic style of landscape with its sweeping panoramas,
solitary trees, steep mountains etc.
Rico painted in Covadonga, in the Sierra Nevada and in the Sierra de Guadarrama.
This first room spans the years 1853 to 1861
and offers us the keys to the artist’s fascination with the natural world.
While still very much a painter of his day, trained in the premises of Romanticism,
in this early phase we can already appreciate Rico’s interest in Realism
and his desire to capture the appearance of things from life,
particularly in his watercolours but also in his oils.
The second room reveals the way Rico started to evolve his own artistic personality,
first with the trip to Switzerland and a stay in London
where he saw works by the great British painters,
then in France where he painted the banks of the Seine, the Oise and the Marne.
In 1864 he painted The Laundrywomen of La Varenne in Saint-Maure
alongside Camille Pissarro in 1864, which is his masterpieces of this period, now in the Prado.
The Museum has masterpieces representative of every phase in Rico’s career.
Throughout his second, French period Rico painted the locations
favoured by the Impressionists and although he did not follow
their particular direction in art he was certainly familiar
with the methods of plein air painting with its fragmented brushstroke and use of pure colour
and employed them to a certain degree although he always aimed to maintain line,
he always aimed to maintain line, which is the most significant difference
between Rico’s work and that of the Impressionists.
With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war
he went to Granada in 1871 on the invitation of Fortuny.
He would spend a year there and this is the time when Rico fully developed the potential
of his taste for colour, light, preciosismo in the handling,
and painstaking execution. The result are true masterpieces
and the present exhibition includes three works from Granada,
one of them the Prado’s own Torre de las Damas,
another from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the third from a private collection.
The experience in Granada would provide the basis for works
subsequently executed in Seville in 1872
in which Rico conveys the city’s positive, joyful atmosphere
with great precision and to considerable effect.
In 1875 he returned to Seville and painted two masterpieces which are
the two oils we see here, well as three watercolours
from that Sevillian phase which have also been brought together here.
Rico also worked in Toledo in 1875 and we have works
that depict these ancient Spanish cities characterised
by their history and monuments and by the richness of their pasts,
which would fascinate Americans.
The exhibition includes these images of monuments juxtaposed with others of humble,
everyday life as if the painter were recovering these architectural jewels
through his unaffected art in order to bring them once more to the attention of the viewer.
The exhibition continues with a section on French and Italian views.
A particularly notable work is the Prado’s view of Paris,
which is a panoramic view painted for the Marchioness of Manzanedo.
Rico had already depicted Paris on various occasions
and had published his drawings of the city in Parisian
and American magazines but this is his first panoramic presentation of it.
The time he spent on the Côte d’Azur in 1881 was also important,
resulting in works of gentler colouring depicting Nice and Beaulieu
with the Mediterranean in the view, painted with a light
that is different to the one he would deploy in Venice.
Also important was the period in Chartres in 1876
when Rico painted the Porte Guillaume in a work that conjures up Corot
but which is interpreted with a different type of light.
The exhibition concludes in Venice. This example from the Drexel collection
is one of Rico’s earliest Venetian views.
When he arrived in the city he was fascinated by it given
that he was already the artist of reflections on calm rivers, on the Seine or on the Oise.
On occasions he depicted locks or canals or what the French call “les bras morts”,
which are small tributaries of rivers with still water.
The Venice lagoon was thus his ideal subject
and he also felt the freedom to paint in the city
“as if it were a huge outdoor studio”, as he explained in a letter to Stewart.
Here Rico painted freely from his hired gondola, depicting the city’s bridges,
painting, in fact, the entire city of Venice,
not only the Riva degli Schiavone as we see here,
but other canals as we see in other works.
Monuments, the different fondamente, the lagoon, Murano...
all became the subjects of Rico’s paintings and with increasing intensity.
Rico also enjoyed growing commercial success
as there was a new focus on everything European in the USA
after the Civil War and for Americans
the city of Venice was one of the symbols par excellence of art
and hence of European culture. Rico became one of the most respected members
of the community of foreign artists in the city,
alongside Sargent and Whistler, and was even a jury member for the Second Biennial.
He also worked in close contact with some of the other American painters such as Chase
and became a figurehead for Spanish grant students in Rome
who came to Venice to paint the city and who followed Rico’s style,
just as Andalusian painters had done in Granada and Seville.
Rico thus became a reference point for his oil paintings,
his pen and ink drawings, his pencil drawings and his watercolours.
Many of these works have been loaned
here from American museums such as the Metropolitan,
the Philadelphia and Brooklyn museums, and the Hispanic Society,
which has been particularly generous.
Together they reveal the truly cosmopolitan nature of Rico as an artist,
which was uncommon in 19th-century Spanish painting,
and Rico became the equivalent to Fortuny
in landscape painting for a lengthy period. Just as his great friend
Raimundo de Madrazo embodied Fortuny’s approach
within the fields of portraiture and society genre scenes,
Rico did so for landscape but with an individuality
and precision that was entirely his own,
expressed over the course of a career that began with
Romanticism and which achieved the remarkable luminosity,
exquisite touch and beautiful use of colour
that make this exhibition a true delight to visit.