"Italy and Spain – (…) Spain exhibits regularly at our annual shows. We find in the catalog of the Champ-de-Mars a dozen artists of Spanish birth or name. Two of them, M. de la Gandara and M. Rusiñol are fine painters in the best sense of the word. M. de la Gandara began by painting still life studies in which the influence of both Ribot and Ribera might be traced. Some small portraits, drawn with the finest pencil and a softened vagueness of quality that lent mystery to the model, gave him his well-merited reputation in Paris. Oil portraits then attracted him; he made some very unequal attempts, but this year his pictures have placed him in the foremost rank. A fair beauty, tall and exquisitely round in modelling with a rather haughty graciousness of expression; a brunette, equally beautiful, with a fine skin and features full of character, have been the subjects of his two full length portraits. The first wears pink and the second white satin. He has rendered with elegance and precision the voluptuous grace, tempered by a look of pride in the fair lady, and the slightly wiry prettiness of the dark one. Whistler's influence, to which he formerly yielded with too much enthusiasm, still pervades his work, but in these two pictures of superior quality, he has borrowed nothing of his master but the sense of style and some peculiarity of atmosphere. The action of the figures is happy and is his own, and so is the execution, with ingenious touches. In short, these are good works, distinguished in their arrangements and yet more in their colouring."
Salon of 1896 – Goupil & Cie