The Women Presiding
Artist: Eduardo Urquiola y Aguirre (Spanish, 1865-1932)
Date: 1915
Medium: Oil on canvas
Collection: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain
Description
Urquiola, a Basque painter specializing in bourgeois portraits and costuming scenes, won a second medal at the 1915 National Fine Arts Exhibition with this painting , the highest award he received at this event, which he entered eighteen times throughout his life. Conceived with true monumentality, this life-size group representation alludes in its polysemous title to the condition of companions of the president of a bullfight of a group of five women, "known to society". The scene captures the moment when they finish dressing up to attend the party. Perfectly portrayed by Urquiola with luxurious outfits, they all wear combs, and three of them also wear mantillas. The white ones were the most appropriate for attending the bullfights, while the black ones were preferred for religious practices. Here, however, both are combined in an alternating succession of colours that orders the space in a harmonious compositional game where everything seems to be in its place. The effect is underlined by the striking presence of the two embroidered shawls of the figures at the ends. The artist paid special and careful attention to the women's adornments, dresses and jewelry to transform this portrait into a costumbrist account of the most widespread festival at the beginning of the 20th century among bourgeois leisure, when bullfighting was one of the great events of society, both at court and in the small towns of the rest of Spain, and represented one of the greatest occasions for class exhibition.
