Emilia Pardo Bazán, Condesa de Pardo Bazán

Emilia Pardo Bazán, Condesa de Pardo Bazán, painted in 1913 and held at the Hispanic Society of America, portrays the most significant female figure in the Hispanic Society portrait series — the Galician novelist, critic, and feminist who was the leading woman of letters in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Spain. Pardo Bazán's naturalistic novels, her advocacy for women's education and professional equality, and her introduction of Zola's naturalism to Spanish literary culture made her a controversial and central figure in Spanish intellectual life. Her exclusion from the Real Academia Española despite overwhelming literary achievement was a widely discussed injustice in her lifetime. Sorolla's portrait of a woman writer of this stature in the same series with Spain's male intellectual leaders was itself a statement about cultural parity.

The portrait of an aristocratic woman writer required Sorolla to balance the conventions of female portraiture — attention to dress, social presentation — with the intellectual characterisation he brought to his male sitters. Pardo Bazán's face receives the same direct, assessing treatment as the writers and thinkers around her in the series. The countess's title and social rank are acknowledged through careful attention to her dress without allowing them to dominate the characterisation.