Self-portrait with his sons Carlos and Vicente

Painted in 1843 and now in the Museum of Romanticism in Madrid, this self-portrait with his sons Carlos and Vicente is among the most intimate and revealing works Esquivel produced. Coming just a year after his recovery from near-blindness — a crisis during which he had feared the permanent loss of the faculty on which his livelihood depended — the image of a father presenting his young sons to the viewer carries particular emotional freight: here is a man who has survived catastrophe and whose gaze, now restored, encompasses the future generation who will outlive him. The Museum of Romanticism provides an ideal institutional context: the Romantic era prized familial sentiment and domestic affection as counterweights to political upheaval, and a painter-father with his sons is a quintessentially Romantic domestic subject. Carlos and Vicente Esquivel both became painters themselves, making this canvas a genuine dynastic image as well as a personal one.

The group portrait requires Esquivel to manage three faces simultaneously — his own, and two children at different ages — while maintaining compositional unity. He organises the group in a tight triangular arrangement, with his own face centrally placed and slightly elevated, the children flanking him at lower height. Each face receives portrait-quality modelling, the children's softer flesh contrasted with the more weathered treatment of the father's features.