The Prado has dedicated an exhibition to an artist from its own founding dynasty whom the museum itself has never exhibited before. 'Ricardo de Madrazo (1852–1917): dibujos y acuarelas' opened on 13 October 2026 in Room 60 of the Villanueva building, in the gallery known as Almacén abierto, and runs until 17 January 2027.

The show gathers 37 works — drawings, watercolours, a self-portrait and the artist's diary from 1894 — of which only two have ever been displayed publicly. Its centrepiece is the Prado's holding of 29 sketchbooks by Madrazo, filled between 1867 and 1917: the museum's second-largest sketchbook collection after the forty albums of Martín Rico. Curated by Pedro José Martínez Plaza, the exhibition reconstructs a career spent in the shadow of more famous relatives.

Ricardo was the son of Federico de Madrazo, brother of Raimundo and brother-in-law of Marià Fortuny — a family that practically defined nineteenth-century Spanish painting. Where his father and brother-in-law commanded the grand manner, Ricardo worked on a smaller, more private scale, and his drawings record a life lived among artists rather than above them. The family workshop, the travel sketchbooks and the artists' circle he moved in all surface in the sheets, which preserve a more intimate history of nineteenth-century Spanish art than the state portraits suggest.

The exhibition's claim is modest and for that reason convincing: that the margins of a prodigious clan can hold their own art-historical interest. For visitors who know the Madrazo name from the Prado's state portraits, this is the first chance to meet the member who drew the family from the inside.