Trained in the rich pictorial tradition of Valencia, Rodes settled definitively in Barcelona in 1819 and became the most important portrait artist in Catalonia during the first half of the nineteenth century. His poetic language combines an academic background with a gradual assimilation of the new romantic style. An example of this is this Portrait of a young man with a blue frock coat, represented as a bust with slight foreshortening to the right. The work comes from a moment when the artist gave very similar characteristics to his pastel portraits, achieving brilliant results. Some particularly representative features of his style are the ease with which he models the subject's face and the even distribution of the light over the picture surface.