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Madrazo, I believe, is living now at least he was a few years ago. He was born and bred an artist. His father, Joseph, had been a pupil under David, and was an artist of more than national renown. He served the Court at Madrid in various diplomatic relations, and won wealth and a noble name.
Up to the time of his assassination, Don Antonio Cánovas del Castillo was its director, and Don Pedro de Madrazo its permanent secretary. The society, now known as the Real Academia de San Fernando, founded in 1752, under the title of Real Academia de las tres nobles Artes, has now had a fourth added to it that of music.
Then, at twenty-two, Fortuny was ordered by the city of Barcelona to accompany General Prim on his Algerian expedition, it was a milepost on his highway of success. Nominally he was secretary to the General. Who it was secured his appointment he never knew; but we have reason to suppose it was Federico Madrazo.
General Prim, soldier and scholar, saw that his secretary was capable of doing something more than keeping accounts, and so a substitute was hired and Fortuny was sent here and there as messenger, but in reality, so that he could see as many sides of old Moorish life as possible. Staid old General Prim loved the young man just as Madrazo had.
One of them, Raimonde Madrazo, is well known in Paris, and, in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three, had several pictures on exhibition at the Chicago Exposition; while another son, Rivera, is a noted sculptor and a painter of no small repute. And so it was that Mariano Fortuny at Barcelona attracted the attention of Federico Madrazo, the artist patrician.
So Mariano Fortuny and the great Madrazo, pupil and teacher, became firm friends. And we know that, in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven, Mariano was voted the "Prize of Rome." Each year this prize was awarded to the scholar who on vote of the teachers and scholars was deemed most deserving. It meant two years of study at Rome with five hundred dollars a year for expenses.
We do not know much concerning the details of Mariano's life at Barcelona, save from scraps of information he now and then gave out to his friends Regnault and Lorenzo Valles, and which they in turn have given to us. Yet we know he won the love of his teachers, and that Federico Madrazo picked out his work and especially recommended it.
These officials are more intent on bleeding their countrymen than the enemy. Mariano applied to his friend Madrazo for advice as to what to do, and Madrazo simply cut the Gordian knot by paying out of his own purse three hundred dollars to secure the release of the young artist.
The hollow is a peculiar and daring medley of architectural elegance and sculptural bizarrerie and vice versa. From Madrazo it drew the exclamation that, since he had seen it, he was convinced that not all monuments belonging to the grotesque style were devoid of beauty.
I can not find that Mariano's work at this time had any very special merit. It merely showed the patient, painstaking, conscientious workman. But the bright, strong, eager young man was the sort that every teacher must love. He knew what he was at school for, and did his best. Madrazo said, "He's a manly fellow, and if he does not succeed he is now doing more he deserves success."
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