Portrait of Manuel Mª Gutiérrez

Dated to 1834 and now in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, this early portrait of Manuel Mª Gutiérrez was painted when Esquivel was establishing himself in Madrid following his formation in Seville. The year 1834 is significant in Spanish history: it was marked by the first constitutional charter (Estatuto Real) and the outbreak of the First Carlist War, a period that brought the liberal bourgeoisie — Gutiérrez's likely milieu — to prominence. An early Esquivel portrait at MNAC rather than the Prado suggests either Catalan provenance or an acquisition by the Barcelona museum that testifies to the nineteenth-century Spanish painting collections assembled in Catalonia. The portrait demonstrates the confidence of Esquivel's early Madrid style — already assured in its tonal construction and psychologically direct — before the personal crisis of his eye illness complicated and deepened his practice.

The 1834 portrait shows Esquivel working with relatively thin paint layers and a more limited tonal range than his 1840s work. The face is modelled with care but without the multiple glaze layers of his mature technique, giving the flesh a slightly more direct, less atmospheric quality. His compositional formula — figure at three-quarter view, neutral background, white collar as light anchor — is already fully formed.