This painting depicts an excerpt of Rinconete and Cortadillo by Cervantes in which Monipodio breaks a plate to use the resulting shattered pieces as an improvised percussion instrument, with which he accompanied Escalante’s dance. Escalante is the female figure in the centre of the scene, performing a folkloric dance in which she stands balanced in one leg and raises her other leg. At the same time, she plays the castanets – made of light-coloured wood with darker grips – while Gananciosa sets the rhythm with a broom (Proyecto de Iconografía Musical, U.C.M.).

Painted in 1858, this is one of the most significant works in the artist’s oeuvre. He exhibited it in the National Exhibition of that very same year. The work is still considered within late Romanticism, although far from the facile and colourful folklore of his better-known pieces. He therefore engages himself in the recreation of a sincere yet unrestrained interpretation of the picturesqueness of the characters. The composition is finished as if a costumbrist scene, paying special attention to detail, which turns out to be easier due to the descriptive meticulousness of Cervantes. Cervantes thus became, for obvious reasons, the favourite source of literary inspiration for 19th-century Spanish painters from a very early date, both in his Novelas Ejemplares and, fundamentally, in Don Quixote.

El mundo literario en la pintura del siglo XIX del Museo del Prado, Madrid, Centro Nacional de Exposiciones y Promoción Artística, 1994, p.154