Son of the painter and restorer Salvador Martínez Cubells, Enrique abandoned his engineering studies in 1892 to enrol in the Special School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. After earning his first accolades at the National Fine Arts Exhibitions, he decided to round out his education by going abroad in 1900. His numerous visits and stays in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, England, Scotland and especially Munich, Germany, not only gave him first-hand knowledge of European naturalism but also placed him in close contact with international art circles, where he enjoyed numerous successes and forged a stellar reputation.

His work also represented a highly modern alternative in the Spanish art world. His paintings of interiors and rural life, urban landscapes and port scenes on the shores of northern Spain, Holland and Brittany, his unique study and use of light and the influence of Max Liebermann, Heinrich von Zügel and Wilhelm Liebl were refreshingly distant from genre themes and regionalist painting, and even from the social realism he had fervently embraced in his early years in Madrid. We see this in Work, Rest, Family (Museo del Prado, on long-term loan to the Museo de Bellas Artes, Valencia), one of his most famous canvases, which sums up many of his distinctive artistic traits.

Around 1910 he began to take a keen interest in fishing scenes, usually set on the beaches of the Valencian coast but with a different approach to that of Cecilio Pla and Joaquín Sorolla. At the numerous exhibitions held in Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro during this decade and part of the 1920s, Martínez often presented paintings of this type, which were much sought-after by distinguished bourgeois patrons and brought him great esteem in the Americas.

They tend to be small-format works that feature the same motifs or characters, normally with few variations. A case in point is Bringing in the Trawlers, where we see two pairs of oxen hauling a lateen-rigged boat onto the sand after a day of fishing. The arrangement and colouring of the animals, the poses of the sailors riding on them and the others standing beside the vessel, and even the form of the waves are all repeated in other paintings from these years. Some of these elements appear in photographs taken in his studio, which have only recently come to light, and a simple comparison with this painting allows us to understand the artist's habitual procedure when making these kinds of works. The variations usually consist in the incorporation of a new figure or vessel, like the one on the left of this composition. However, its wind-filled sail is similar to one found among the numerous photographs that the painter frequently used to study the various elements he later portrayed in his canvases. [Pedro J. Martínez Plaza]