578 - JOSE CAMPECHE

JOSE CAMPECHE Puerto Rico (1751 / 1809) "Our Lady of the Rosary" Oil on canvas. With its original Baroque frame with shaped profiles in gilt wood and channels decorated with rocailles and mirrors. Jose de Campeche was a self-taught painter who learned the rudiments of painting in his father's workshop. Of his family background we know that he was the son of a freed slave and that his mother was Spanish, born in the Canary Islands. Both made an effort to give their son a careful education since, in addition to being a painter, he studied philosophy and the humanities, also receiving musical training. His output focused on portraits and religious painting, fusing some characteristics of European Rococo with certain elements from the local tradition. His paintings, like this Virgen del Rosario attributed to him here, show an interest in detail and ornamentation, and in them the dominant colour palette tends to be the bluish and pinkish greys he assimilated from Luis Paret, a painter at the Spanish court with whom he was associated between 1776 and 1778. Campeche is considered one of the most outstanding painters of Spanish America in the late 18th century, for the quality of his works and for the importance of his active workshop, in which his brother and his nephew, Silvestre Andino Campeche, also worked. Measurements: 41 x 28 cm.