Pilar Gandiola

Dating from 1838 and housed at the Museo del Prado, this portrait of Pilar Gandiola was painted during Esquivel's first decade of sustained success in Madrid, before the eye illness of 1838-1839 that temporarily halted his career. The name Gandiola suggests a family connected to the emerging liberal-professional class whose members formed the social base of Esquivel's clientele. The late 1830s were a turbulent period in Spain — the First Carlist War had divided the country, and the liberals who backed the Isabelino cause looked to French and British models of fashion and culture as markers of their political alignment. Esquivel's portraits of women in this period reflect this cultural orientation: his female sitters are posed and dressed in the Franco-British manner, with the high waists, puffed sleeves, and arranged curls of the Romantic mode, even as they retain the psychological directness that connects his work to the Spanish portrait tradition of Velázquez and Goya.

Esquivel builds the portrait on a warm ground that establishes the dominant colour temperature before the first paint layers are applied. The fashionable puffed sleeves — a hallmark of 1830s dress — are rendered through careful modelling of the fabric's highlights and shadows, respecting the cylindrical form beneath the cloth. His flesh-tone system here is relatively warm and smooth, consistent with his pre-illness technique.