Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta's Masquerade Ball at the Ritz Hotel, Paris, painted in 1909, captures the fashionable costumed entertainments of Belle Époque Paris with the polished, precise finish that made Madrazo, a member of a prominent Spanish dynasty of painters, a sought-after chronicler of elite social life in France and Spain. The crowded, brightly lit composition and attentive rendering of costume and fabric reflect the technical facility that underpinned his considerable commercial success in his lifetime. Oil on canvas, the picture entered the collection through the bequest of Emma T. Gary in 1934. Scion notes that genre pictures documenting a specific, identifiable social occasion, like this one, carry historical interest that extends beyond the artist's technical accomplishment alone.