Daniel Vázquez Díaz portrayed Ramón Gómez de la Serna for the first edition of his novel La quinta de Palmyra, published in 1923. That same year he published a similar portrait in the section “Nuestras celebridades por dentro y por fuera” [Our Celebrities Inside and Out] in the newspaper ABC. A number of renowned portraits of artists and writers belonging to the Fundación MAPFRE Collection are part of this series.

Vázquez Díaz did not fully adopt Cubist language due to his fidelity to the subjects he portrayed and his will to capture their particularities. This was rooted both in a non-transferable physical structure (in the case of Gómez de la Serna, the rotund head, slicked back hair, and evasive gaze), as well as in his talante (Serna’s commitment to the renewing of artistic forms).