Museo Carmen Thyssen

The son of Antonio Cabral Bejarano (1798–1861), with whom he trained, and brother of the lesser known Francisco Cabral Aguado Bejarano (1824–90), Manuel attended the Seville School of Fine Arts, where he later taught. He was also an honorary member of the Seville Academy of Fine Arts, honorary court painter to Isabella II and a member of the Seville Society of Emulation and Development.

He entered genre paintings in many provincial exhibitions, among them those held in Cadiz (1856, 1864, 1879 and 1880) and Seville (1856, 1858 – winning a silver medal for a scene of Andalusian customs – 1867 and 1878), as well as in all the National Exhibitions of Fine Arts staged in Madrid (between 1858 and 1890). In that of 1858, his painting The Corpus Procession in Seville (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado), executed the previous year, obtained an honorary second-class mention and was acquired by the state. In both this painting and in Easter Friday Procession in Seville (Seville, Reales Alcázares) of 1862, he depicted people and architectural details of the city with painstaking precision and these works are therefore of considerable documentary value. Despite their small size, many of the figures are portraits, a genre he also espoused. Among others, he painted portraits of Manuel Barrón for the Seville Academy of Fine Arts; Antonio Cabral Bejarano, Nicolás María Rivero and others for the Biblioteca Colombina library in Seville; Juan García de Vinuesa and José Luis Albareda (Seville council); Javier Lasso de la Vega (Seville Academy of Medicine); and also a Self-Portrait (Madrid, Museo del Romanticismo) dated 1851. Prominent examples of history painting, the least important genre in his career, are La Santa Cruz sobre las aguas (“The Holy Cross on the Waters”) and La caída de Murillo del andamio (“Murillo’s Fall from the Scaffolding”), both in the Cadiz Museum of Fine Arts.

Cabral Aguada’s style evolved from the influence of Murillo, of whose work he made copies, to sharply drawn genre scenes painted in a somewhat cold palette which included his finest works of the 1860s and 1870s. Years later his style became rather affected owing to his tendency towards technical preciosity.

Javier Barón