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Tracing included in a letter from Pedro de Madrazo to his brother Luis from Madrid, 20 December 1855.
© Archive of the Museo Nacional del Prado. Volume II, letter PE 64.

The Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson, in collaboration with the Museo Nacional del Prado, is pleased to present the exhibition The Collection of Letters from the Madrazo Archive in the Museo del Prado: A Joint Publishing Endeavour. On display in one of the rooms at our Madrid centre, it features a selection of letters from the Museo del Prado’s Madrazo Archive and forms part of the joint publishing project which the two institutions carried out between 2017 and 2023.

In 2023, the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson and the Museo Nacional del Prado completed the project begun in 2017 to publish the Madrazo family’s collection of letters in three volumes. They include nearly 1,900 letters, from which some of the most interesting specimens were selected for display.

Curated by Pedro J. Martínez Plaza, a conservator in the Nineteenth-Century Painting Department at the Museo del Prado and editor of the three volumes of letters, the exhibition features fifteen original specimens from the Madrazo Archive and two portraits from the FMCMP Collection: of  Antonio Ferrer del Río (1856), by José de Madrazo; and of  Juan Bravo Murillo (1849), signed by Federico de Madrazo. The letters provide a privileged insight into the production of the latter portrait, highlighting their importance and usefulness.

Thanks to their quantity and diversity, the letters in the Madrazo Archive shed light not only on the different disciplines of their authors but also on an array of social, artistic and political matters, as well as some of the most important institutions in Spain. The exhibition The Collection of Letters from the Madrazo Archive in the Museo Nacional del Prado: A Joint Publishing Endeavour offers an eloquent testimony to all of this through fifteen of the original letters selected from the three published volumes.

The Museo Nacional del Prado purchased the private archive of the Madrazo family in 2012. The letters—2,635 in total—are of particular interest, having been written by more than five hundred authors, including names such as Mariano Fortuny and his wife Cecilia de Madrazo, Mariano Benlliure, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Juan Bravo Murillo, and different members of the Madrazo family: Ricardo, Raimundo, Isabel, Federico, Fernando, Juan and others. With the patronage of the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson, the Museo del Prado has published nearly 1,900 letters distributed in three volumes: the first in 2017, the second in 2022 and the third in 2023.