Salvador Albacete (b. Cartagena, Murcia, 1827, d. Madrid, 1890) was a renowned jurist who specialised in trade and tax law. He was governor of the Banco de España from 1885 to 1890, so he held the post longer than anyone else during the construction of the bank’s headquarters designed by Eduardo de Adaro. However, he did not live to see the building completed. On the morning of 4 August 1890, he suffered a stroke in his office in the bank’s old headquarters on Calle Atocha and died at his home some hours later. Just two days before, de Adaro had written to inform him that the marble steps of the main entrance were not ready for installation and there would thus be a further delay in completing the project, though there is of course no reason to believe that this was a causal factor in his demise.

After his death the board of the bank resolved to have a portrait of him painted and hung in the Governors’ Gallery. That portrait was entrusted to Francisco Más y Carrasco, an artist from Valencia who was building something of a reputation for himself in Madrid at that time. Receipts filed in the archives of the bank reveal that he received a fee of 1000 pesetas, with payment being made on 10 and 12 October that same year. However, until recently this oil painting was attributed first to Catalan artist Joaquín Mir y Trinxet and then to an unknown artist called 'J. Mas'.

Esperanza Guillén, joint curator with Yolanda Romero of the exhibition The Architecture of Eduardo de Adaro and the Banco de España. A Changing World and author of the book Eduardo Adaro. The Architect of the Banco de España, published to coincide with the exhibition's opening, explains that the initial of the given name of the artist in the signature was misread as a 'J' instead of an 'F'. 'However, comparisons of signatures and the recent discovery of certain documents in the Historical Archives of the Banco de España reveal without doubt that the picture is by Francisco Más y Carrasco'. 

^{Francisco Más y Carrasco: Portrait of Salvador Albacete (1890)}

Few details of Más’s life can be given with any certainty. For instance his dates of birth and death are unknown. It is, however, known that he was renowned as a painter of naturalistic and literature-inspired landscapes, and of portraits. This latter facet is evidenced by his painting of Salvador Albacete, in which Esperanza Guillén states that "he shows himself to be an artist far removed from the prevailing profiles of the academic art of his time". The portrait was painted after the subject's death, probably based on photographs. Governor Albacete's mandate included the period when the bank took over the state treasury service and the floating debt of the Treasury.

Más shows him against a dark background with no props. His face is almost in profile and he is wearing a metal-framed pince-nez from which a fine cord hangs. He is seated in a chair with wooden arms. His gaze is directed outwards, and his expression is serious but not severe. He is wearing a black suit and cravat over a white shirt, so the picture looks very different from other, more protocol-laden portraits that hang in the Gallery of Governors. It is also very different from another portrait of Albacete, owned by the Museo del Prado and currently on deposit at the Museum of Jaén. This other painting, by Seville-born painter Manuel García (nicknamed 'Hispaleto') shows him wearing the Grand Cross and the Sash of the Order of Charles III, following his appointment as Minister for Overseas Territories in 1879. The portrait by Más uses loose brush-strokes, a simple composition and a limited palette of colours with ochre predominating at the top of the canvas and darker colours below, relieved only by lighter highlights on the hands and the shirt cuffs from which they emerge, and the shine of the varnished wood of the chair in which the governor is sitting.

^{Manuel García "Hispaleto": Salvador Albacete, Minister for Overseas Territories}

As mentioned, little is known about the life of Francisco Más, and even that little contains errors, probably originating from the Diccionario biográfico de artistas valencianos ['Biographical Dictionary of Valencia Artists'] published by the Baron of Alcahalí in 1897. Using information drawn from the press of the time and the catalogues of some of the exhibitions in which Más took part, Esperanza Guillen has determined that after his early years in Valencia, where he made something of a name for himself with his costumbrist landscapes (for instance in 1881 his work A Country was awarded an honourable mention in an exhibition at the Ateneo Casino Obrero), he moved to Madrid in the mid 1880s. There he sought to broaden his customer base and forge links with established artists such as Mariano Benlliure and Juan Luna Novicio. He soon earned appreciation in certain intellectual circles in the Spanish capital, and a caricature of him with his artist's palette even appeared on the cover of the weekly magazine Madrid Cómico.

In the late 1880s and early 1890s he also showed his work at exhibitions in Barcelona and formed a close association with the Círculo de Bellas Artes cultural association. This is evidenced by the fact that the June 1894 edition of the magazine Blanco y Negro included him in a series of caricatures of artists drawn by Ramón Cilla and published under the title Los doce del Círculo ['Twelve from the Circle']. The other artists caricatured in the series included Joaquín de Sorolla, Tomás Muñoz Lucena and Ricardo de Madrazo. They had all agreed to donate works to raise funds for a monument to Velázquez. This monument, in the form of a statue by sculptor Aniceto Marinas, was eventually erected in front of the Prado in 1899, marking the 300th anniversary of Velázquez's birth.

^{Ramón Cilla: Los doce del Círculo ['12 from the Circle']. Caricatures published in the magazine Blanco y Negro in June 1894, including one of Francisco Más [pictured on the right]}

One of the last references to him in Spain mentions him as being present at the soirées organised in Madrid by politician and writer Vicente Riva Palacio, Mexico's Minister for Spain and Portugal. His links to Riva Palacio may have influenced his decision to move to Mexico around 1896 or 1897 and set up a studio there. This is mentioned in an account by poet Juan José Tablada of a visit to Más's studio, where he says that he saw several pieces on which the artist was working. Specifically, he mentions a portrait 'in chiaroscuro' of novelist Federico Gamboa. Works by Francisco Más known to be located in Mexico include The Bull, at the Ateneo Fuente Gallery in Saltillo, The Charros, purchased in 1908 for the galleries of the former Academy of San Carlos, and a painting of a coat of arms which hung for many years in the main lecture hall of the Autonomous National University of Mexico.