"On the state of the troops that garrison the frontier line of the nine interior provinces of New Spain." Watercolor by Ramón de Murillo. From Sección Mapas y Planos, Uniformes no. 57, courtesy of Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain.

There are few eyewitness works of art from the Spanish period that relate to Texas, but Ramón de Murrillo's watercolor of a leatherjacket soldier from the Texas frontier is one of them. Painted perhaps in 1804, it, along with two other watercolors, accompanied Murrillo's plan for the reform of New Spain's defenses, which John Wheat has translated and Jesús F. de la Teja has annotated and introduced in this issue of the Quarterly.