Circle of JOSEFA DE ÓBIDOS (Seville, 1634 - Óbidos,... Lot n° 5

Circle of JOSEFA DE ÓBIDOS (Seville, 1634 - Óbidos, Portugal, 1684). "Virgin spinner. Oil on canvas. Re-tinted. It presents repainting. Measurements: 65 x 45,5 cm; 79 x 59 cm (frame). In this devotional work Mary girl appears seated, spinning with a distaff and a spindle. The iconography refers on this occasion to the Protoevangelium of James, one of the apocryphal Gospels, in which it is narrated how, as a child, Mary was commissioned by the priests to make the veil of the Temple, which was torn when Jesus died. On the other hand, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew recounts the Virgin's mastery of woollen work in her youth. The work has aesthetic similarities with the painting by Josefa de Ayala y Cabrera known as Josefa de Óbidos, an artist from the second half of the 17th century, who developed her career in Portugal. Her father, Baltasar Gómez Figueira, went to Seville around 1626, at a time when Portugal and Spain were unified. He began working in the workshop of Francisco Herrera the Elder, Josefa's future godfather, with whom he spent the first years of his life before returning to Óbidos, his father's hometown. Josefa decided to devote herself to painting, beginning to work alongside her father. One of the first genres they developed and thanks to which they gained fame and fortune were still lifes, as it was a subject that was not practised in Portugal and proved to be a fantastic commercial success. He had a close relationship with the ecclesiastical sphere, which facilitated the commissioning of numerous works in churches and convents. His fame continued to grow after he was commissioned to paint the famous portraits of the royal family. His painting, as can be seen in this work, shows the influence of the tenebrist naturalism that characterised his father's style, but he developed his own personality as a reflection of a particular poetic intuition, with a loose palette and free of academic impositions, focusing on the detail of the decorative elements that populate his canvases. In 2015 the Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon held an exhibition dedicated to this great artist as the architect of the invention of the Portuguese Baroque, emphasising her importance as one of the few outstanding painters in the history of modern art.