Spanish painter. Although very little known about his life, he must have been a prominent member of the Madrid painting scene of the early 18th century. He was the son of an unknown Lucas de Ezquerra from the town of Pomar (Burgos), who was unrelated to the world of painting, and not of the painter Domingo de Ezquerra as has sometimes been assumed. His life and painting indicate a clear link with Juan Carreño de Miranda. In her will of 1686, Carreño's widow bequeathed him a sword and dagger that had belonged to her husband - an obvious testament to their close personal relationship - while their artistic link can be seen in his Immaculate Conception, signed in 1710, in the convent of Clarissan nuns in Olite (Navarre), which is faithfully based on the models created by Carreño. In 1725 Ezquerra was appointed official appraiser of paintings by the Council of Castile, a post for which he had competed the previous year with other Madrid painters, who complained of the monopoly so far enjoyed by Palomino and García de Miranda (1677-1749) in this activity, to which Ezquerra had devoted himself since 1688 at least. Owing to the very few known examples of his output, little can be said about his style. However, the Allegory of Water in the Museo Nacional del Prado gives an idea of his loose, fluent brushwork - traits inherited from Carreno - and his skills at the depiction of landscape, in which he was clearly influenced by the world of Venice and Velázquez that prevailed in the aesthetic of court landscape paintings at the end of the century. One of the salient features of his art was probably his ability to merge the seicentista painting tradition with the new language of the early decades of the 18th century, which already displayed some pre-Rococo elements. //