Eugenio Caxés

He was in the middle of a battle picture when he died. In December 1634 Eugenio Caxés left a large canvas of the relief of San Juan de Puerto Rico begun and unfinished, one of a set of battle scenes ordered for a new hall in Philip IV's Buen Retiro palace. What happened next is unusually well documented. In March 1635 the painter Antonio Puga declared that he had been working in Caxés's house on those pictures, and in April Luis Fernández, who had trained with Caxés, was paid 800 reales for finishing the one his master left begun. The 20th-century Spanish scholars Angulo and Pérez Sánchez proposed that even the composition may have come from another hand, that of the court painter Vicente Carducho.

Caxés was born in Madrid in 1574 to a Florentine father, the painter Patricio, who had been brought over to work at El Escorial for Philip II and who taught him. He became painter to the king in August 1612. His surname is printed several ways and both Caxés and Cajés are current, the Prado using Cajés.

The action in the picture is from October 1625, when a Dutch fleet had taken the town of San Juan and the Spanish garrison pushed it back out. The governor, Juan de Haro, stands in the foreground.