The Painter Aureliano de Beruete

In 1898 a Madrid painter called Aureliano de Beruete published in Paris one of the first monographs on Velázquez. He had trained as a lawyer and sat two terms in the Spanish parliament in the 1870s before giving himself to landscape, working the countryside around Madrid and the hills of the Guadarrama. Sorolla painted him four years after that book appeared, seated in front of an easel that carries one of Beruete's own canvases, so he appears as a working painter rather than as the scholar who wrote about one. In the lower left corner there is a dedication, to my friend A. de Beruete, with the signature and the year, which is why 1902 here is a documented date and not an estimate. Beruete died in January 1912, and Sorolla organised the first retrospective of his painting in his own house in Madrid.