Vicente Lopez y Portaña Valencia 1772 - 1850 Madrid

Marqués de Santa María de Silvela.

In 1785 Vicente López y Portaña entered the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos in Valencia at the age of 13. Within four years the prodigious artist had won a number of prizes for his work, including his painting of Tobias Restoring his Father's Sight (today in the Museo de Bellas Artes, Valencia) and was awarded a scholarship to the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. During his few formative years in Madrid he was strongly influenced by the work of the leading academicians, notably Mariano Salvador Maella and Gregorio Forro, whose style continued the tradition established earlier in the century by Anton Raphael Mengs. In 1790 López returned to Valencia and became vice-director of painting at the Academia. The majority of the artist's work from his early phase however is religious in subject matter, for example, his painting of The Adoration of the Trinity (see lot 357).

Following the death of his wife in 1814 however, López was summoned to Madrid by Ferdinand VII, to whom he was appointed Pintor de Cámara, and within a short time he was appointed first court painter, replacing Maella, alongside the great master Francisco de Goya. The present portrait was painted in 1839, at a time when López was the foremost portrait painter in Spain, following the death of Goya in 1828. The remarkable attention to detail, the precision of brushwork and realism with which the artist captures the character of his sitter, reveals the qualities for which he was so widely admired during his lifetime, as still today.

Don Mateo Casado y Sirelo Romero de Samaniego was born in Ciudad Real on 25 January 1790. He was 'oficial mayor de la Direccion del Real Giro' and in 1833 he joined the order of Charles III.  In this portrait by Vicente López he is depicted at the age of 49, wearing the cross and badge of the Order of Charles III, the cross and sash of the Order of Isabel la Católica and the cross and badge of the Order of San Fernando.