The painting is surrounded by a false frame, which acts as a support for a boy trying to escape from his own portrait. Borrell used this device to allude to the centuries-old aspiration in Western art to break free from the two-dimensional constraints of the painting and create the illusion of a third dimension. The painting has had different titles. When first shown at the 'Exhibition of Art Objects', in Barcelona (1874), it was presented as A Thing that Cannot Be, alluding precisely to that tension between the second and the third dimension. In his own personal records, Pere Borrell referred to it as Boy Emerging from the Frame, a title that was undoubtedly easier to associate with the work.

In time (from at least 1905), it came to be known as Escaping Criticism, linking it to another of the fundamental themes in the rhetoric of painting in the Modern Age, particularly in contemporary times: the major influence of art criticism and its role (like the two-dimensional nature of the painting itself) as a sort of inevitable restraining corset against which the artist had to 'fight'. Indeed, although the painting sold for a handsome price at the exhibition, and garnered much praise among the public, it was censured by one young critic, Apel-les Mestre (1854- 1936), later to become a renowned intellectual, who called it a 'trivial and puerile [...] joke'.

It is important to remember that the young Mestre was writing at a time when painting was being called upon to make a new commitment to reality, and he was commenting on a piece that equated 'realism' with 'illusionism', ignoring all other contents. In terms of its composition, the painting followed in a long tradition going back to the late Middle Ages. The Flemish artists had quite often painted scenes in which a figure (generally the subject of a portrait or a sacred figure) is framed by a window, and the figure itself or the objects placed on the sill appear to protrude into the space of the viewer. Over time, the formula grew more complex. The window was replaced by a simulated picture frame to create the twin illusion that it was not the 'living' figure that was breaking out of its 'prison', but an explicitly pictorial figure, thus challenging the notion of the frame and two-dimensionality. The device is an extension of another theme beloved of the Western tradition, the 'painting within a painting'.

There are some interesting examples from the seventeenth century. Amongst the Spanish artists, Murillo's Self-Portrait (National Gallery, London) is one of the best-known. In turn, this painting harks back to the prints often included in the frontispieces of books, with a portrait of the author, often appearing to emerge from the frame. Several Dutch artists also experimented with similar themes, including Rembrandt, whose Holy Family (Kunstsammlungen, Kassel) not only simulates the frame, but also a curtain partially drawn across the painting. The tradition continued, with fresh embellishments, across much of Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Borrell therefore had a considerable number of precedents to draw on for his work. Nonetheless, although this painting can be linked to an already familiar typology, Escaping Criticism is a particularly outstanding example, which takes the logic of the trompe l'oeil one step further. It does not depict an object or a static figure that appears to belong to our own space. Instead, it is a character in the painting who takes a very active part in this game; finding himself trapped in his pictorial prison, he tries to climb out of the represented space into the real space.

As Apel-les Mestre himself acknowledged, the painting piqued the public's interest from the moment it was first shown. It sold for a handsome price (375 pesetas) and the artist went on to repeat the composition on at least two further occasions, with a number of alterations. In January 1876 he had already painted a second version. The most important change here lies in the type of frame from which the boy escapes, which in this case has a decorated groove. The age and appearance of the subject are also different: the boy looks a little older, his hair is more dishevelled and his mouth gapes open in dread. Technical analyses have shown that the original face of the boy in the picture in the Banco de España was also slightly different to the final version. This suggests that Borrell began by painting the false frame and then went on to create the rest of the composition. A third version (private collection) differs from the other two in that it shows a plain frame, without moulding. Once again, the boy is shown emerging from the picture, with his hands and right foot in similar positions. However more of his torso is visible, he is looking further up and his mouth is half open, midway between the depictions in the two earlier versions. This third picture remained in the possession of its author, who probably wanted to keep some memento of one of his most popular compositions.

Escaping Criticism occupies a prominent place in his artistic career, as it is his earliest known trompe l'oeil. He had previously painted some still lifes, which had probably provided some grounding for his move into illusionist art. From 1874 onwards, no doubt encouraged by the success of the painting now in the Banco de España collection, he frequently painted scenes that tested the limits between the real and the painted, a feature that was to become one of the hallmarks of his work. These include: Peasant with Two Bunches of Grapes (1877), in which the subject holds the bunches in his right hand and rests his left on the painted frame; Peasant Woman with a Cluster of Grapes, exhibited at the 1878  Exposition Universelle in Paris; several portraits (including one of his wife) in which the sitters are shown leaning on or stepping through false frames; and various versions of a composition entitled A Bad Joke from 1882, in which he again employed the same device as in his 1874 work, Escaping Criticism. Here, however, he took the technical challenge one step further; the false frame is now round rather than rectangular, and the subjects are two children, one of whom is holding the other in his arms, as if leaning over a precipice on this side of the frame.

By not only mirroring a tradition, but also offering an explicit reflection on it, this painting is consistent with much of the artistic historiography of the last half century, with its increasing interest in self-reflexive phenomena. Consequently, the painting has gained significant fame. It has been displayed in many exhibitions in Spain and abroad and has featured on the cover of a considerable number of books on issues of pictorial representation, making it probably the most prestigious piece in the Banco de España collection, after the Goyas.

Javier Portús