The most famous painter who succeeded Goya was Vincente López, better known for his portraits than for his other canvases, a skilful artist with a perfect knowledge of technique, conscientious, fecund, minute in detail, who has left us the reflection of a whole generation.
Classicism arrived in Spain with all the lustre of the triumphs of Louis David, under whose direction José de Madrazo placed himself, the first of those artists of this type to maintain a position of dignity throughout three artistic generations. He held an important place among contemporary painters at a difficult time during which, in consequence of the political disorder which reigned, the commissions usually given by the churches and religious communities ceased, private persons acquired few paintings, and the academies decreased in the number of their students. It was a time in which art offered but little wherewithal to its votaries.
But this period of paralysis was of short duration. The pictorial temperament, which inalienably belongs to Spain, and the appearance of romanticism, with a tendency conformable to the spirit of Spain, and which had for a long time given a brilliant impulse to her men of letters, revived painting, which forgot its period of exhaustion. The frigid classicism, ill-suited to the national genius, now passed away. José de Madrazo was succeeded in prestige and surpassed in ability by his son Federico de Madrazo. By his portraits he has bequeathed to us faithful renderings of all the personages of his day, which compete with those of the greater foreign portrait painters among his contemporaries.
Studying at first under classical influences, but regarded as romantics in their later development, were remarkable portrait painters like Esquivel and Gutiérrez de la Vega, and a landscape painter of especial interest, Pérez Villamil, who may in a manner be compared to the great English landscape painter Turner, though he had no opportunities for coming in contact with him or any knowledge of his work. Both men, each in his own environment, breathed the same atmosphere; and, although reared in lands remote from one another, thought in a like manner because they both reflected the period in which they lived. Becquer and others adequately maintained the descriptive note which now entered into the making of popular subjects.