Portrait of the Engraver Pasqual Pere Moles, first director of the Escola de Llotja

Pasqual Pere Moles (1741–1797) was the first director of the Escola de la Llotja in Barcelona — the art school attached to the Barcelona exchange that trained generations of Catalan artists, including the young Fortuny decades later. López Portaña's 1794 portrait of Moles, now at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, commemorates an institution-builder as much as an individual — Moles founded the school in 1775 and spent his career establishing the educational and professional infrastructure for Catalan art. As an engraver, Moles represented the technical dimension of academic art training that eighteenth-century academies saw as foundational. López Portaña, who benefited from similar institutional support in Valencia, may have had personal sympathy for this portrait of a fellow craftsman who had built educational structures for the next generation.

The portrait of a graphic artist required compositional acknowledgment of the sitter's professional practice — engraving tools, prints, or a copper plate appearing as identifying attributes alongside the formal portrait conventions. López Portaña renders the engraver's world with the same material care he brings to fabrics and medals in his other portraits, making the tools of the trade as vivid as the sitter himself.