For a year, Father Gonzales sent the eight dollars on the first of each month. And then there came to him a brusk notification from Claudio Lorenzale, the Director of the Academy, to the effect that certain sums had been provided by the City of Barcelona to pay the expenses of four of the most worthy pupils at the Academy, and Mariano Fortuny had been voted as one who should receive the benefit of the endowment.
Father Gonzales read the notice to Grandfather Fortuny, and then they sent out for a fowl, and a bottle and a loaf of bread two feet long; and together the two old men made merry.
The grandfather had now fully come to the belief that the lad would some day be a great artist.
We do not know much concerning the details of Mariano's life at Barcelona, save from scraps of information he now and then gave out to his friends Regnault and Lorenzo Valles, and which they in turn have given to us.
Yet we know he won the love of his teachers, and that Federico Madrazo picked out his work and especially recommended it.
Madrazo, I believe, is living now—at least he was a few years ago. He was born and bred an artist. His father, Joseph, had been a pupil under David, and was an artist of more than national renown. He served the Court at Madrid in various diplomatic relations, and won wealth and a noble name.
Federico Madrazo used to spend a portion of his time at the Academy of Barcelona as instructor and adviser to the Director. I do not know his official position, if he had one, but I know he afterward became the Director of the Museum of Art at Madrid.
Madrazo had two sons, who are now celebrated in the art world. One of them, Raimonde Madrazo, is well known in Paris, and, in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three, had several pictures on exhibition at the Chicago Exposition; while another son, Rivera, is a noted sculptor and a painter of no small repute.
And so it was that Mariano Fortuny at Barcelona attracted the attention of Federico Madrazo, the artist patrician.
I can not find that Mariano's work at this time had any very special merit. It merely showed the patient, painstaking, conscientious workman. But the bright, strong, eager young man was the sort that every teacher must love. He knew what he was at school for, and did his best.