Artist and engineer born in Palma de Mallorca in 1769.

In Agustín de Betancourt’s second trip to England, between November 1793 and October 1796, Bartholomew Sureda, a young Spaniard of great artistic temperament and talent for mechanics accompanied the engineer. Betancourt paid from his own pocket his travelling and teaching expenses. He received drawing lessons and learned the new techniques to engrave copper plates: the aquatint and the wash. With these new techniques it was possible to make modifications to the plate, scraping the copper and polishing it later with a steel instrument with a rounded tip, called burnisher.

Back in Spain, Sureda served as custodian or trustee of the Royal Cabinet of Machines, replacing Antonio Álvarez, and implemented the new wash technique, as shown in the illustration of the Bramah Press, reproduced in 1798 in the Descripción de las Máquinas de más general utilidad que hay en el Gabinete (Description of the Machines of more general utility that there are in the Cabinet).

Bartolomé Sureda was who taught these new techniques, previously unknown in Spain, to Francisco de Goya. Goya used these techniques masterfully in the series of Los Caprichos, engraved between 1798 and 1799. The Aragonese painter made, a few years later, a splendid portrait of Bartolomé Sureda, now in the National Gallery in Washington.

Many years later, Bartolomé Sureda, who was in Majorca had lost his job as director of the Real Fábrica de Porcelanas (Porcelain) del Buen Retiro, was reinstated to active duty in 1817 as director of the Real Fábrica de Paños (Cloth) de Guadalajara, moving in 1821 to act as director of the Real Fábrica de Loza (Pottery) de la Moncloa. The same year that Betancourt died in St. Petersburg, Sureda was appointed director of the Real Fábrica de Cristales (Glass) de la Granja.