Amelia Núñez de Castro, marquesa de Peñaflorida

Painted in 1854 and now at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla, this portrait of Amelia Núñez de Castro — who held the title Marchioness of Peñaflorida — was produced three years before Esquivel's death and represents his mature style at its most assured in aristocratic female portraiture. The title Marchioness of Peñaflorida connects the sitter to the Basque nobility that had been important in Spanish intellectual and cultural life since the eighteenth century. By the mid-1850s Esquivel's reputation as Madrid's leading portraitist was well-established, and commissions from titled women demanded the combination of social flattery, costume virtuosity, and psychological sensitivity that he had refined over two decades. The work's location in the Seville museum — rather than in Madrid — suggests either a gift to the city's cultural institutions or an acquisition reflecting Sevilla's pride in its most celebrated nineteenth-century painter.

Esquivel employs a warm, relatively light ground for this late portrait, allowing the flesh tones to maintain luminosity without heavy layering. The marquesa's silk dress — its colour lost to time but likely a fashionable deep tone — is built with broad initial strokes establishing the main folds before final highlights are placed with a loaded brush. The face shows Esquivel's mature practice of softening the transitions between tonal zones to achieve feminine grace without sacrificing structure.