Ignacio Zuloaga Eibar 1870-Madrid 1945

Gregorio Martínez Sierra, Ignacio Zuloaga, Madrid, n.d., pl. 15, illustrated
Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, The Life and Work of Ignacio Zuloaga, Barcelona, 1991, p. 514, no. 429, catalogued

Original canvas. There are a few spots of cosmetic retouching in the lady's dress and a spot in the lower right corner. Some of the pigments in the lady's face fluoresce under ultraviolet light though this does not appear to be retouching. Apart from a few signs of faint craquelure the paint surface is in good overall condition. Held in a simple carved wooden frame.
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Painted in Paris in 1917. According to Enrique Lafuente the present work is the first of two oils that Zuloaga painted of Sra Atucha, the South American millionairess. Zuloaga painted the second oil a year later; it depicts the sitter full length wearing a black evening dress. 

Zuloaga's elegant portrayal of his wealthy sitter wearing a flowing diaphanous scarf, luxuriant shawl, silk dress and thick fur muff shows how far he had travelled as a painter since his arrival in the French capital in 1889. Then he had entered the atelier of Eugène Carrière to study, and he had lodged with Santiago Rusiñol and Pablo Uranga, the latter becoming his lifelong friend. Living on the Ile St Louis, in his memoirs Rusiñol recounted how the young Zuloaga would isolate himself to paint, locking himself into his studio to work solitarily on his own. Over time, however, the Basque developed a wide and influential group of friends and acquaintances there, including Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin; the latter he took on a tour of Madrid, Toledo and Andalusia in 1905. By now Zuloaga was married, a proud father and well settled in Montmartre, and the same year his work was singled out for considerable praise when exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit.

Gradually a pattern developed in where he would work and when: Paris during the winter and part of the summer, Segovia or Madrid, and Eibar in the north of Spain at different times during the rest of the year. And as the years passed too, so he sent his pictures to an increasing number of international exhibitions from Rome to Santiago in Chile. Indeed by the time the present work was painted Zuloaga was enjoying huge acclaim in the USA, where a large number of his paintings were on exhibition, touring to museums and galleries in New York, Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Saint Louis and Minneapolis. The show was accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with a foreword by John Singer Sargent. At the heart of Zuloaga's work, however, lay his Basque pride, and it was by 1917 when the present work was painted, that he was really benefiting from the construction of his house, studio and chapel at Zumaya on the coast outside Bilbao.