The Contemporary Poets. A Reading by Zorrilla in the Painter's Studio

The reading never happened, at least not like this. Esquivel worked the men up one at a time from separate sittings and gathered them into his own studio in Madrid, where a brazier stands on the floor and the canvas on the easel is barely begun. What they share is the Liceo Artístico y Literario, the club where the city's writers, painters and musicians met, and something more particular than that. An illness around 1838 left Esquivel nearly blind, and it was the members of the Liceo who put up the money for the treatment that gave him his sight back. Eight years later he painted the subscribers, and showed the picture at the Academy of San Fernando's exhibition of 1846. The young man standing near the centre with a sheet of paper in his hand is José Zorrilla, then 29, whose play Don Juan Tenorio had opened in Madrid two years earlier and is still staged there every year around All Saints.