Artista: Antonio Maria ESQUIVEL Y SUAREZ DE URBINA (1806-1857).Medida: 61 x 37 cmHe was born in Seville in 1806. From a noble family, he was educated precariously when his father died as a hero of the Battle of Balian (1808). At just 17 years old and already declared a liberal, he held the arms against the French invasion of the Duke of Angouleme that ended the second constitutional regime in 1823. He began his painting studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Seville. There he became familiar with the pictorial technique and detail in the style of Murillo. But he married Antonia Rivas or Ribas, from whom he had three children: the painters Carlos Mara and Vicente, and Julia, and he did not receive enough commissions in Seville to support his family.3 For this reason, in 1831, he moved to Madrid together with his friend, the also Sevillian painter Jos? Gutierrez de la Vega, and there he competed at the San Fernando Academy, being named a merit academic. In contact with the Madrid intellectual environment of those years, he actively participated in the founding of the Artistic and Literary Lyceum in 1837, where he would teach Anatomy, a subject that he would also later teach at the San Fernando Academy.In 1839, he suffered a disease that left him practically blind, for which he fell into a deep depression.4 When his colleagues and friends, poets and artists learned, covered the costs of a treatment carried out by a French ophthalmologist, thanks to which he healed and regained his vision.4 The artist, grateful, painted his friends, poets and painters of Romanticism. As official recognitions, he received the plaque of the Siege of Cadiz and was appointed commander of the Order of Isabel la Católica. In 1843 he was appointed Chamber Painter and in 1847 San Fernando academic, being also a founding member of the Sociedad Protectora de Bellas Artes. As a painting theorist, he wrote a Treatise on Pictorial Anatomy (1848), the original of which is kept in the Prado Museum. He also wrote two monographs ("Jos? Elbo" and "Herrera el Viejo", in El Artista, 1847) and cultivated art criticism. He wrote about history painting (The Echo of Commerce, 1841) and about the German Nazarenes (The Correspondent, 1842). He died in Madrid in 1857.His sons Carlos Mara Esquivel (1830-1867) and Vicente Esquivel were also painters.

Very Good Condition Provenance available upon request. Private Collection.