10 Euro Federico de Madrazo

Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz dominated Spanish portrait painting through the mid-nineteenth century, serving as director of the Prado on three separate occasions and leaving a body of work so entangled with the Bourbon court that his reputation suffered badly after the 1868 revolution that deposed Isabella II — a queen he had painted repeatedly. This coin was issued as part of Spain's long-running series honoring figures from its artistic patrimony, a program the Real Casa de la Moneda has used since the 1990s to anchor silver commemorative output to cultural biography.

His friendship with Liszt and correspondence with the Nazarene painters in Rome place him at nearly every significant node of nineteenth-century European art — a fact his purely Spanish reputation tends to obscure.