John Haskins

Painted in two major colonial American centers, these portraits from Boston and Mexico City (then New Spain) share a formality of pose and an emphasis on fine costume that reveal a common source in European portraiture. John Haskins holds his hand on his hip, in a pose of authority found in Elizabethan portraits. Nevertheless, this upright barrel maker known as “Honest John Haskins” was a modest patron when compared to his wealthy and ambitious Mexican counterpart. The inscription at the bottom of Don Ignacio Leonel Gómez Cervantes’s portrait lists honors and inherited titles that explicitly identify him as a descendant of an aristocratic Spanish American family.