Copy after Baltasar de Echave Orio (about 1558 - about 1620, Mexico City)
Don Diego Caballero, 17th century
Oil on canvas, 103 x 79 cm (40 9/16 x 31 1/8 in.)
This vertical, oval oil painting is a half-length portrait of Don Diego Caballero, a finely dressed gentleman. He is shown from the waist up, turned slightly to the right in a three-quarters view. He is light-skinned with a ruddy complexion. He has a receding hairline of grayish brown hair, dark brown eyebrows and eyes, and a gray mustache and beard. His nose is long and his face comes to a point at the chin. Don Diego wears a flowing, jet black robe with a stiff white ruff that hits just below his ears, cheeks, and chin. White ruffled cuffs are visible at his wrists, and a black and silver belt is visible at his waist. His right hand is held facing his body; his left hand is upturned with three clenched fingers and a pointed index finger and thumb. Over the figure’s head hangs a coat of arms with a double-headed eagle, two stars, a castle, and a lion.
Vatichino
Commentary
Isabella Stewart Gardner’s induction into the Hispanic Society in 1911 reflected more than a fascination with Spain alone. Her enthusiasm for Spanish speaking cultures also found expression closer to home in the art of Mexico.
In 1871, long before she began to collect the works of celebrated European painters, Isabella Stewart Gardner attended a sale of Mexican art in Boston. The auction house offered “the noble pictures of Mexican masters” purchased from convents and monasteries dissolved by the Mexican government a decade earlier. For a mere thirteen dollars, Gardner bought this pendant pair of portraits attributed to the eighteenth-century Mestizo painter Miguel Cabrera (1695–1768).
They depict Don Diego Caballero and his wife Doña Inés, a wealthy Spanish couple who owned the largest sugarcane plantation in New Spain and profited from the abundance of enslaved labor exploited by colonial settlers. In 1600, they founded a convent in Mexico City dedicated to Santa Inés. Intended for poor girls without dowries, it housed thirty-three nuns including the Caballeros’ nieces as well as a number of orphans. Gardner’s paintings of its founders are probably local copies after originals by Baltasar de Echave Orio (about 1558 – about 1620).