This portrait of Domingo Gayoso de los Cobos, 11th Marquis of Camarasa, was probably painted by Agustín Esteve around 1800 on the occasion of the marriage of his son Joaquín to Josefa Manuela Téllez Girón, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, whom Esteve, who had a long-standing relationship with this noble house, had portrayed along with the rest of his brothers two years earlier. It is strange, however, that the newly appointed court painter did not also portray the bridegroom, so perhaps the Marquis of Camarasa came into contact with the Valencian painter a little earlier and the occasion for the portrait was his succession to the Marquisate of Camarasa in 1791, as the paper the sitter is holding in his left hand may indicate.
Born as a second son in a house of the Galician nobility, that of the Counts of Amarante, from the death of his elder brother in 1765, he succeeded to the Galician titles of Amarante, through his father, and the Marquisate of Puebla de Parga, through his mother, But even more unexpected was the succession to the house of Ribadavia in 1776 and to the house of Camarasa in 1791, due to the death without descendants of two of his mother's cousins, in the first case, because they were of rigorous agnation, and of three other cousins in the second. These houses had estates scattered throughout Aragon, Castile and Andalusia, so that Domingo Gayoso became part of the highest aristocracy, being able to marry his first-born son to the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, who, due to their union with the Benavente house, was the house that, at the end of the 18th century, enjoyed the greatest income.
There seems to be no intention of idealisation in this canvas, which is a typical full-length court portrait of Esteve, which, in addition to the forms learned from his master, Mengs, and his friend, Goya, combines the painter's taste for small details, as seen in the careful drawing of the flowers on the waistcoat and the claw feet topped by caryatids on the console on which he rests his hand.