Sofa reveals 18th-century art
Mexican artist Miguel Cabrera made one set of casta paintings and it’s considered the genre’s finest.
Lots of people have a stray fuzz ball or two kicking around under the sofa, or perhaps a missing sock to match the lonely one at the bottom of the laundry hamper.
Christina Jones Janssen had something more valuable under the couch in her San Francisco Bay Area home: a lost and extremely rare masterpiece of 18thcentury painting, neatly rolled up and remarkably well-preserved.
She suspected it might be important, and her sleuthing led to what art experts are calling one of most important discoveries of Mexican Colonial art in recent memory.
The picture is a long-lost work by Miguel Cabrera (circa 1715-68), the greatest painter of his era in Mexico City, capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. His prolific workshop produced religious and secular art for the Catholic Church and the social elite.
Over the course of nearly 250 years, the painting travelled more than 19,000 kilometres, including a trip back and forth across the Atlantic.
Now the picture has arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which scored an impressive coup in acquiring the missing masterpiece.
The painting is the sixth in a distinctive set of16 casta paintings, a controversial but fascinating genre invented in Mexico. In a system devised by white elites, castas explore the Enlightenment Age theme of miscegenation, or interracial marriage, among Indians, Spaniards and Africans. About 100 sets are known, although most have been broken up.
Cabrera painted only one set, widely considered the genre’s finest.
The painting shows a prosperous Spanish father and doting Moorish North African (or Morisca) mother dandling their cheerful albino baby. The figures are life-size. It’s the third and largest casta in LACMA’s collection that represents this ethnic combination.
She had no idea just how important the legacy would turn out to be.
“I didn’t even know what a casta was,” Janssen said. “But my father always said it belonged in a museum.”
The painting’s surprise reappearance follows a circuitous route through the last100 years, recounted by Janssen. From Spaniard and Morisca, Albino (1763) came to the U.S. in the early 1920s, bought by David Gray, son of Ford Motor Co.’s founding president.
In 1919, Gray and his three siblings inherited $26 million from the settlement of their father’s original Ford investment. Gray promptly moved from snowy Detroit to balmy Montecito on the outskirts of Santa Barbara.
There, the taste for building Spanish Revival mansions was in full swing. Gray travelled to Spain to buy furnishings for the sprawling house, which he named Graholm, including the easily transportable Cabrera scroll.
Before his death in 1928, Gray gave the painting to his neighbour, real estate executive James R.H. Wagner. The scroll passed then down through Wagner’s family to Janssen, his great-granddaughter.
Christopher Knight writes for the Los Angeles Times