This motif of swordsmen, highly sought after at the time. Remember the influence of the novel The 3 Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, published in 1844, which, like good fiction of the 17th century epic, did not fail to relate the usual intra-history of past warrior glories and Manichean palace intrigues. A painting that any bourgeois could hang in his domestic rooms; or, if you want an interpretation in line with the sociology of Art: it is the reduced – and more salable – format of those enormous canvases that reflected historical milestones for the admiration of the large public attending the National Exhibitions stimulated by politicians and their commissioners in matters artistic events (mostly from the liberal side), to which painters and sculptors invariably competed seeking the fame that would earn them to execute these small-sized works, more feasible with the current demand and almost certain commercialization. However, Agrasot is not interested in the heroic nature of the dueling swordsmen, as his friend Domingo Marqués sometimes painted, but rather he shows them calm and sleepy at the doors of a barracks, while other soldiers appear through the arch in the background, surprising them in his careless dream. The perfect geometries of the paving, arch, window and the bench where the musketeers sit stand out in this canvas, in addition to the very successful gestures of each of the characters detained as in a snapshot.
