If there was a painter who enchanted the French bourgeoisie of his time, it was none other than Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891). His paintings on marches of the great Napoleonic military campaigns were greatly admired in the Second Empire, but also his small format paintings (tableautin) in which he represented happy scenes of everyday life in the 18th century, but from a fully nineteenth-century aesthetic. . Fortuny admired him for his precision, and transmitted that affection to his painter friends in Rome and Granada, among whom he always counted Agrasot. The man from Oriola always knew how to execute his particular vision of other artists, never copied as is, but forcing them to a second reading of those in the manner of syncretism that interested him personally. This funny young man, hookah in hand, painted clay jugs and glass of wine, dressed in eighteenth-century clothing, has the charm not only of mastery of drawing both in the anatomical posture and in outlining his clothes, but he also turns out here to be a virtuoso of the color in its different shades of red-hot garnets, black grays and whites that give even more spectacularity to such a relaxed scene, not to mention the shades of the wall and its precise shading down to the floor in a chromatic pastel.
