Doña María de la Luz Padilla y Gómez de Cervantes

Throughout the Spanish empire and in Europe in general, the lesser nobility and wealthy merchant classes imitated the royal courts in their patronage of the arts, including the commissioning of full-length portraits. Doña María de la Luz (whose adult portrait is also on view in this exhibition) is portrayed here in her Mexico City town house with a toddler’s rattle and a silver-mounted coral pacifier. Despite her young age, the sitter wears an embroidered silk dress in the height of French fashion complemented by a costly pearl necklace and matching earrings and bracelets. In Spanish America, the early eighteenth century saw the rise of the female portrait, which had been nearly nonexistent in seventeenth-century Mexico and Peru.

The painting of John Van Cortlandt, a young member of New York’s Anglo-Dutch elite, is likewise based on a European model, in this case British Grand Manner portraits of the period. The sitter wears a man’s European formal jacket of wool and inhabits a fanciful setting.