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Lot Essay
Born in Madrid to the politician and amateur painter Fernando Garrido Tortosa, Eduardo Garrido trained with the prestigious painters Federigo de Madrazo and Vincente Palmaroli, studying under their tutelage in Paris and Rome respectively. Garrido began to show at the Paris Salon in 1875, at which time he won a grant from the Madrid Provincial Government to continue his studies there.
A painter par excellence of conversation pieces set in 18th Century interiors, Garrido played to the nostalgia for the previous century, which had come to assume an almost mythic significance for a bourgeois Europe in the wake of revolution. Well-chronicled in the writings of brothers Edmund and Jules de Goncourt, the preceding century had come to be mythologized as an epoque of elegance, a characteristic many found lacking at the time. The new rich in particular looked back in adulation of the society of yesteryear in which the aristocrat held sway. Emulation of patrician taste and acquisition of social respectability were the quintessence of paintings such as The Palace Ball, which depicted elegant people in such rococo surroundings as Versailles and Fontainbleau, venues Garrido was able to sketch on location.
A painter par excellence of conversation pieces set in 18th Century interiors, Garrido played to the nostalgia for the previous century, which had come to assume an almost mythic significance for a bourgeois Europe in the wake of revolution. Well-chronicled in the writings of brothers Edmund and Jules de Goncourt, the preceding century had come to be mythologized as an epoque of elegance, a characteristic many found lacking at the time. The new rich in particular looked back in adulation of the society of yesteryear in which the aristocrat held sway. Emulation of patrician taste and acquisition of social respectability were the quintessence of paintings such as The Palace Ball, which depicted elegant people in such rococo surroundings as Versailles and Fontainbleau, venues Garrido was able to sketch on location.