- Title
- Morisca Woman and Albino Girl (Morisca y albina)
- Date Made
- circa 1760
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- Unframed: 36 × 28 in. (91.4 × 71.1 cm); framed: 41 1/2 × 34 × 1 1/2 in. (105.41 × 86.36 × 3.81 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2009.62
- Collecting Area
- Latin American Art
- Curatorial Notes
The clothing worn by this woman offers clues to her ethnic origin. Women of African descent in New Spain wore similar black overblouses, fastened with colorful ribbons and gold and silver brooches, and covered their chests with local rebozos (shawls). They developed these fashions in response to sumptuary laws that banned Black women from wearing Spanish-style clothing. This figure holds an open box of cigarettes, calling attention to a typical American product—tobacco. While the scene likely portrays a mother of African ancestry and her albino offspring (at that time, albinos were wrongly believed to descend from Black people), it is also possible that contemporaneous viewers imagined that it depicted a Spanish child and her wet nurse.
The young girl holds a rattle and is dressed with a fine linen or cotton blouse and a simple enagua (skirt); she wears a medallion, coral necklace, and hand-shaped figa charm to protect her against the evil eye. Infant mortality was common in those days, and children were often bejeweled with all sorts of amulets, a convention seen as well in Spanish court portraiture depicting children.
Ilona Katzew
2024
- Provenance
Gerald Paget, New York, mid-1960s; Paget family, New York, 1990s; Derek Johns Ltd., London, 2009; LACMA, 2009.
- Selected Bibliography
- Katzew, Ilona, ed. Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici. Exh. Cat. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Mexico City: Fomento Cultural Banamex; New York: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2017.
- Katzew, Ilona, ed. Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800: Highlights from LACMA’s Collection. Exh. Cat. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: DelMonico Books/D.A.P., 2022.
- Selected Exhibition History
- Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World. November 6, 2011 - January 29, 2012
- Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici . Sunday, November 19, 2017 - Sunday, March 18, 2018
- Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici . April 24 - July 22, 2018
- Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici . June 29 - October 15, 2017
- Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800. June 12, 2022 - October 30, 2022
- Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800. October 20, 2023 - January 28, 2024
- Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800. June 22, 2024 - September 08, 2024
