Lucas Velázquez drew his inspiration from different sources over the course of his career. Like Alenza, he drew on Siglo de Oro and Dutch painting for some of his landscapes, whose fantastic character allows us to relate them to works by Pérez Villaamil, although Velázquez’s execution is more frank and direct, with a clear tendency toward expressive sketchiness.

His fertile imagination led him to compete with Pérez Villaamil in painting rapid landscapes based on arbitrary paint stains -a customary practice by both artists that recalls the blotting suggested by Alexander Cozens in 1785. Goya also used this technique in his miniatures, taking advantage of the shapes generated by a drop of water on a blackened ivory surface. In that sense, Velázquez’s drawings and washes reveal an intense and subjective capacity to suggest, with a peculiarity that recalls some washes by Victor Hugo, or even Turner. Lucas’s impetuous temperament made him capable of a graphic expressiveness equalled only by the posterior work of Fortuny. Moreover, that procedure reveals his facility for what was known as el repente, that is, spontaneous imagination and the immediate rendering of shapes associated with a specific atmosphere of creative liberty characteristic of Romanticism (Text drawn from Barón, J. in: El siglo XIX en el Prado, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007, p. 39).