Antonio María Esquivel

Antonio Maria Esquivel built a career as the portraitist of Romantic Madrid, and then in 1839 he began to go blind. A painter who could no longer see, he sank into despair and threw himself into the Guadalquivir river in his native Seville. He was pulled out alive. His fellow writers and artists at the Liceo, the city's literary club, took up a collection and sent him to a noted eye surgeon in France, and by the end of 1840 his sight had come back.

The best-known picture of his second life is a group portrait from 1846, now in the Prado in Madrid. It shows the poet José Zorrilla reading aloud in Esquivel's studio to a crowd of some 40 writers, painters, and musicians of the day, each one a recognisable likeness, gathered beneath a large canvas on the wall. It works as part portrait gallery, part record of who mattered in Spanish Romantic culture.

Esquivel worked mostly in portraits and religious paintings, and he wrote a treatise on anatomy for artists. He died in Madrid in 1857, aged 51, by then a member of the San Fernando fine-arts academy.