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 The painting, lauded as a masterpiece of colonial Mexican art
depicting mixed-race families of the era, has been acquired by
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, known as LACMA.
Museum curator Ilona Katzew said the painting was one of two
missing pieces from a set of 16 painted by Miguel Cabrera, a
master portraitist in high demand in the religious and social
elite of New Spain, a Spanish territory that included what is
now Mexico.
"It's one of the most important paintings from colonial Mexico
to come up in the market in the past 10 years," Katzew said,
estimating the auction value at $1 million.
The painting, "From Spaniard and Morisca, Albino," depicts a
Spanish man and a mulatto woman dressed in elegant clothes and
jewelry who exchange tender looks while holding a fair-skinned
child with light blonde hair. Hung on a scroll, the piece
measures more than four feet (1.20 meter) tall and three feet
(90 cm) wide.
Painted in 1763, the artwork came to the museum through
Christina Jones Janssen, an attorney in Northern California
whose family had held the piece for several generations.
According to family lore, Janssen's great-grandparents received
the work in the late 1920s as a gift from David Gray, the son of
one of the first Ford Motor Co. presidents. Gray had purchased
it in Spain.
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The painting traveled to various homes in Janssen's family over the
years. When she noticed the canvas coming loose from the scroll, she
tucked it under her couch for safekeeping. Last year, to fulfill her
late-father's wish to discover its origins, Janssen began sleuthing.
Art experts quickly identified the work as belonging to Cabrera's
set of castas, a popular 18th century genre depicting the racial
mixing of Spaniards, Africans and indigenous people in colonial
Mexico.
Janssen has made a partial donation of the piece to LACMA. A trustee
is funding the rest of the sum, which the museum declined to
disclose.
According to Katzew, Cabrera's casta is widely considered the best
of the genre. Fourteen other pieces of Cabrera's set reside in
museums and private collections, but one is still missing.
(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Sandra Maler)
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