Madrid

Madrid (マドリード) is a 1925 oil on canvas by Shimizu Toshi, painted during his Spanish travels of 1925. The composition shows an urban view of the Spanish capital — most likely a street scene in the Plaza Mayor or one of the surrounding districts of central Madrid — with the heavy stone façades and the bright Castilian sunlight that give Madrid painting its characteristic palette. The work belongs to the same Spanish-period group as Outskirts of Toledo and a related set of compositions from the 1925 trip, and it documents the shift from the dark Ashcan tonality of Shimizu's New York paintings to the brighter, more saturated palette of his European years. Madrid was at the time still a relatively small capital by Northern European standards, and Shimizu's painting registers the white-and-ochre tonality of the Castilian city under summer light with a directness inherited from his Sloan training. The work is in a private collection in Japan and is in the public domain.