Francisco Domingo Marqués

Francisco Domingo Marqués learned to paint by copying Ribera, the dark, dramatic Spaniard of the 1600s, in the academy of his native Valencia. That taste for bold contrast never quite left him, even after his palette grew lighter and brighter in Paris decades later.

Born in 1842, he moved from Valencia to Madrid to study under Federico de Madrazo, the leading Spanish portraitist of the day, then won a scholarship to Rome in 1868, where he worked in the studio of the history painter Eduardo Rosales. In 1875 he settled in Paris, and there his career took its real shape: polished historical genre scenes and portraits for wealthy patrons, many of them clients inherited from Marià Fortuny, the celebrated Catalan painter who had died young the year before.

In Paris he absorbed the tight, small-scale manner of Meissonier, the French master of the miniature-like scene, and brightened his colors under the new influence of the Impressionists, without ever joining them. He kept working into the 20th century and died in 1920, having spent most of his life far from the Valencia where he had started.