Lot Essay
“one of the most successful that he has ever painted”
- A. Philip McMahon on Zuloaga’s Portrait of Margaret Kahn (Retrato de Miss Margarita Kahn)
A. Philip McMahon, 'Aspects of Ignacio Zuloaga' in The Art Bulletin, 1925, Vol. 7, No. 4, June 1925, p. 126, fn. 44)
An artistic descendant of the Spanish Masters Velasquez, Zurbaran, Ribera, El Greco and Goya, Ignacio Zuloaga studied at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, indulging in his passion for these earlier masters. In 1898, he spent six months focusing on the works of Renaissance painters in Rome. With this wealth of learning from these years and the years that followed spent studying in Paris under the influence of Henri Gervex, Eugène Carrière and his friendships with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas; Zuloaga emerged as one of the premier Spanish artists in the early years of the 20th century. He was championed by the American portraitist, John Singer Sargent, as a painter who re-interpreted the great traditions of Spanish art into a powerfully modern idiom.
Portrait of Margaret Kahn (Retrato de Miss Margarita Kahn) combines elements from both Zuloaga's Parisian and Spanish lives, as well as portrait and landscape genres, to make a striking image, indeed, writing in The Art Bullitin, A. Philip McMahon described Zuloaga’s portrait of Margaret Khan as ‘one of the most successful that he has ever painted’. (op. cit. p. 126).
Zuloaga had reached considerable international fame as a portraitist by the time he painted his portrait of Margaret Kahn. Unlike his portraits of male sitters, who usually gaze obliquely out of the composition, virtually all of his female portraits show women confronting the viewer head-on, wearing expressions that vary from provocative to amused, but always supremely self-assured. Here, Margaret Kahn is looking towards the viewer, a confident, almost wry smile playing across her lips. She dominates the composition entirely, not only in her pose, but in the way she completely fills the picture plane. The picture is lent particular drama by the contrast between Margaret’s pale face and the dark, brooding sky, and by the billowing clouds. The sitter is set into a monumental composition with a strong vertical pull, her shawl echoing the clouds behind her; her modern expression challenges the portraiture of the day.
As so often in his portraits, Zuloaga has purposefully juxtaposed extraneous elements: Margaret Kahn is set against a backdrop depicting a Spanish town, wearing a bright Spanish shawl. Both these contrasting motifs thus appear as traditional emblems of Spain with which Zuloaga identified, the latter colourful and cheerful, the other raw and brooding. The landscape thus serves to heighten the psychological intensity of the painting, and to provide a chromatic contrast with the vivid red of the dress. Conjured up by Zuloaga as a Goyan maja dressed in the colours of El Greco, Margaret Kahn dominates the viewer and the landscape.
The companion shoulder-length charcoal sketch to this portrait, Portrait of Margaret Kahn, 1923. [charcoal and graphite on paper, 14 x 9 3/4 in. (36 x 25 cm)] passed by descent through the family of the artist, just as this work has passed by descent through the family of the sitter. The sketch – an inversed line drawing of the shoulder length detail in the painting – relays the artist’s working method. It was recently generously given to the Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas, by the artist’s grandson Rafael de Zuloaga y Suárez (Fig. 1).
Margaret-Dorothy Kahn Ryan (1901-1995), always called ‘Nin’ by all who knew her and many who did not, was a collector, philanthropist and the daughter of banker Otto Kahn (1867-1934).
A New York Times article reporting her marriage at the beginning of the 20th century summarized her position within a prominent New York family: “the bride's father [Otto Hermann Kahn] is a member of the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. He is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Opera House, and a patron of the arts. She is a granddaughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. Bernhard Kahn of Mannheim, Germany. On the maternal side she is a granddaughter of the late Abraham Wolff, one of the great bankers of New York in his day”. (New York Times, 10 February 1928). Indeed, Abraham Wolff was the head of the Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, which Otto joined after leaving his native Germany. Notably this family tree is discreetly mentioned at the close of the piece, which trained stronger focus on “her gown of soft ivory colored satin [which] was made on simple lines and was embellished with old rose point lace. Her veil, also of old rose point lace, fell in graceful folds over her long court train of satin’. (ibid.) Such detailed written description is reminiscent of the painterly focus which Zuloaga has defined her dress in the current painting.
In 1928 Margaret married John Barry Ryan Jr. (1901-1966) the grandson of Thomas Fortune Ryan (1851-1928), the American insurance and transportation magnate. This was a marriage between two prominent New York financial dynasties. Together they collected French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings and drawings. The Ryan collection included, among others, work by Manet, Cezanne, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir and Vuillard. One obituary at the end of the 20th Century would observe, ‘Nin Ryan inherited her love of opera from her father, the banker and philanthropist Otto Kahn, and like him she became a generous benefactor and a member of administrative committees of the Metropolitan Opera of New York and travelled great distances to centres of music and festivals in America and Europe in pursuit of the best that they had to offer. She was a friend of some of the best singers, instrumentalists and conductors of our time… She loved the arts (but especially music) and had a very discriminating taste in painting … the works of art on her walls were of the first order. Her generosity to young artists was steady and concealed firmly. She read enormously; nothing of cultural value was alien to her.’ (The Independent, 10 February 1995).
- A. Philip McMahon on Zuloaga’s Portrait of Margaret Kahn (Retrato de Miss Margarita Kahn)
A. Philip McMahon, 'Aspects of Ignacio Zuloaga' in The Art Bulletin, 1925, Vol. 7, No. 4, June 1925, p. 126, fn. 44)
An artistic descendant of the Spanish Masters Velasquez, Zurbaran, Ribera, El Greco and Goya, Ignacio Zuloaga studied at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, indulging in his passion for these earlier masters. In 1898, he spent six months focusing on the works of Renaissance painters in Rome. With this wealth of learning from these years and the years that followed spent studying in Paris under the influence of Henri Gervex, Eugène Carrière and his friendships with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas; Zuloaga emerged as one of the premier Spanish artists in the early years of the 20th century. He was championed by the American portraitist, John Singer Sargent, as a painter who re-interpreted the great traditions of Spanish art into a powerfully modern idiom.
Portrait of Margaret Kahn (Retrato de Miss Margarita Kahn) combines elements from both Zuloaga's Parisian and Spanish lives, as well as portrait and landscape genres, to make a striking image, indeed, writing in The Art Bullitin, A. Philip McMahon described Zuloaga’s portrait of Margaret Khan as ‘one of the most successful that he has ever painted’. (op. cit. p. 126).
Zuloaga had reached considerable international fame as a portraitist by the time he painted his portrait of Margaret Kahn. Unlike his portraits of male sitters, who usually gaze obliquely out of the composition, virtually all of his female portraits show women confronting the viewer head-on, wearing expressions that vary from provocative to amused, but always supremely self-assured. Here, Margaret Kahn is looking towards the viewer, a confident, almost wry smile playing across her lips. She dominates the composition entirely, not only in her pose, but in the way she completely fills the picture plane. The picture is lent particular drama by the contrast between Margaret’s pale face and the dark, brooding sky, and by the billowing clouds. The sitter is set into a monumental composition with a strong vertical pull, her shawl echoing the clouds behind her; her modern expression challenges the portraiture of the day.
As so often in his portraits, Zuloaga has purposefully juxtaposed extraneous elements: Margaret Kahn is set against a backdrop depicting a Spanish town, wearing a bright Spanish shawl. Both these contrasting motifs thus appear as traditional emblems of Spain with which Zuloaga identified, the latter colourful and cheerful, the other raw and brooding. The landscape thus serves to heighten the psychological intensity of the painting, and to provide a chromatic contrast with the vivid red of the dress. Conjured up by Zuloaga as a Goyan maja dressed in the colours of El Greco, Margaret Kahn dominates the viewer and the landscape.
The companion shoulder-length charcoal sketch to this portrait, Portrait of Margaret Kahn, 1923. [charcoal and graphite on paper, 14 x 9 3/4 in. (36 x 25 cm)] passed by descent through the family of the artist, just as this work has passed by descent through the family of the sitter. The sketch – an inversed line drawing of the shoulder length detail in the painting – relays the artist’s working method. It was recently generously given to the Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas, by the artist’s grandson Rafael de Zuloaga y Suárez (Fig. 1).
Margaret-Dorothy Kahn Ryan (1901-1995), always called ‘Nin’ by all who knew her and many who did not, was a collector, philanthropist and the daughter of banker Otto Kahn (1867-1934).
A New York Times article reporting her marriage at the beginning of the 20th century summarized her position within a prominent New York family: “the bride's father [Otto Hermann Kahn] is a member of the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. He is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Opera House, and a patron of the arts. She is a granddaughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. Bernhard Kahn of Mannheim, Germany. On the maternal side she is a granddaughter of the late Abraham Wolff, one of the great bankers of New York in his day”. (New York Times, 10 February 1928). Indeed, Abraham Wolff was the head of the Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, which Otto joined after leaving his native Germany. Notably this family tree is discreetly mentioned at the close of the piece, which trained stronger focus on “her gown of soft ivory colored satin [which] was made on simple lines and was embellished with old rose point lace. Her veil, also of old rose point lace, fell in graceful folds over her long court train of satin’. (ibid.) Such detailed written description is reminiscent of the painterly focus which Zuloaga has defined her dress in the current painting.
In 1928 Margaret married John Barry Ryan Jr. (1901-1966) the grandson of Thomas Fortune Ryan (1851-1928), the American insurance and transportation magnate. This was a marriage between two prominent New York financial dynasties. Together they collected French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings and drawings. The Ryan collection included, among others, work by Manet, Cezanne, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir and Vuillard. One obituary at the end of the 20th Century would observe, ‘Nin Ryan inherited her love of opera from her father, the banker and philanthropist Otto Kahn, and like him she became a generous benefactor and a member of administrative committees of the Metropolitan Opera of New York and travelled great distances to centres of music and festivals in America and Europe in pursuit of the best that they had to offer. She was a friend of some of the best singers, instrumentalists and conductors of our time… She loved the arts (but especially music) and had a very discriminating taste in painting … the works of art on her walls were of the first order. Her generosity to young artists was steady and concealed firmly. She read enormously; nothing of cultural value was alien to her.’ (The Independent, 10 February 1995).