MIGUELCABRERA Lot n° 38

Signed "Cabrera Fecit". Miguel Cabrera was the most recognized New Spanish painter of the mid-18th century. He worked for laity, religious orders and secular clergy; he was appointed chamber painter to the archbishop of Mexico, Manuel José Rubio y Salinas, and reached a comfortable economic position at the end of his life. Miguel Mateo Maldonado y Cabrera was born between 1715 and 1720 in the city of Antequera in the Oaxaca Valley, but there is no news of his childhood and youth. It was not until 1739 - the year in which he married Doña Ana María Solano in Mexico City - that we have information about his life. At Ibarra's death in 1756, Cabrera took his place as the most important painter of his time and he was the director of the academy, becoming the axis of other important artists such as José de Alzíbar and José de Páez. The first contacts between Cabrera and the members of the Society of Jesus in New Spain, (founded by San Ignacio de Loyola in 1540 and whose members arrived in New Spain in 1572), occurred in the 1940s in Mexico City, where he began to establish a network of relations with Jesuits such as Antonio de Herdoñana and other architects such as Higinio de Chávez with whom he would later work in Tepotzotlán. Cabrera also worked for other schools, such as Oaxaca, Valladolid (now Morelia), Querétaro, Guanajuato and Zacatecas, as well as the Casa Profesa in Mexico City. He painted numerous canvases with the principal saints of the Society: St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Francis of Borja, St. Louis Gonzaga and St. Stanislaus of Kostka, which helped to set iconographic models and strengthen devotion. 58 x 47,5 cmOil on copper