The painting shows two fashionable ladies seated in a traditional Spanish pharmacy. Clad with much lace and fluffiness, they sit daintily while a courtly physician takes the pulse of one of them. The pharmacist looks on. Like many pharmacies on the continent of Europe, the pharmacy retains its traditional furnishings from at least a century previously, with a wall of polychrome ceramic tiling, some eighteenth-century books, and a wonderful array of ceramic drug jars. The physician, the pharmacist, and the ladies are portrayed with nostalgia for a vividly imagined pre-Napoleonic utopia of elegance, leisure and politeness. The picture is the best-known work by the Catalan artist, who was born in Barcelona and ran an art academy there. It is a type of picture which was enormously popular in its time, and remains so: historical figures, though outwardly very much of their own time, are shown to behave in amusingly familiar ways which transcend limitations of time and place.