Aguirre moved to Madrid between 1745 and 1752 and began studies there at the newly founded Academy of San Fernando the following year. In 1758 he obtained a pension from Ferdinand VI to complete his training and made copies of works by great masters, including Diego Velázquez and Luca Giordano. In 1760 he painted a portrait of the new monarch, Charles III, and in 1770 he was elected academician of merit at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. Five years later, he began his intense activity for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara as a cartoon painter. He worked under the direction of Mariano Salvador Maella who, at first, provided him with preparatory drawings for the commissioned models. The chosen subject matter and the style of the compositions intended to cover the walls of the royal residences at El Pardo and El Escorial follow the reigning aesthetic currents of that time: hunting and genre scenes in which Aguirre emphasizes the deeply Spanish and picturesque aspects of popular culture. The twenty-or-so known cartoons by his hand show a preference for varied color schemes and a rococo taste in which the figures behave with refined elegance and the animals move gracefully. He quite successfully reproduces different surfaces -textiles or furs, highlights or shadowed tones- with a technique based on dense brushstrokes. Besides his work for the factory, Aguirre made frescoes and religious compositions undeniably marked by the influence of Corrado Giaquinto. In 1784 he took advantage of the opening left by Nicolás Lameyra—"assistant for the composition of paintings"—to request the post of restorer and assistant to Maella in caring for the royal collections. He was only involved in that work for a short time, however, as in March of that same year he was appointed director of the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, where he died in 1800 after working intensely as a teacher (Reuter, A. in Enciclopedia, 2006, vol. II, p. 338).