San Antonio 1718: Art from Mexico

CONTENTS

Foreword by KATHERINE C. LUBER

Foreword by MARÍA CRISTINA GARCÍA CEPEDA

Preface by DIEGO PRIETO

Preface by LIDIA CAMACHO CAMACHO

Introduction

MARION OETTINGER JR.

ESSAYS

Time and Space on the Missionary Frontier

Cultural Dynamics and the Defense of Northern New Spain

KATHERINE McALLEN

At Empire’s Edge

Spanish Colonial San Antonio (1718–1821)

GERALD E. POYO

Politics, Society, and Art in the Age of Bourbon Reform

Placing the Portrait in Eighteenth-Century New Spain

RAY HERNÁNDEZ-DURÁN

In the Footsteps of Sor María de Jesús and Fray Margil de Jesús

A Guadalupan Atlas

JAIME CUADRIELLO

A Second Golden Age

The Franciscan Mission in Late Colonial Mexico

CRISTINA CRUZ GONZÁLEZ

Essay Notes

CATALOGUE

People and Places

The Cycle of Life

The Church

Catalogue Notes

Bibliography

Contributors

List of Figures

List of Plates

Acknowledgments

Lenders to the Exhibition

Credits

Index

FOREWORD

Three hundred years ago the city of San Antonio was founded as a strategic outpost of presidios and missions on the edge of northern New Spain, imposing Spanish political and religious designs on a contested, often hostile region. The city’s missions bear architectural witness to the time of their founding, but few have walked these sites without wondering who once lived there and what they saw, valued, and thought. San Antonio 1718: Art from Mexico presents a wealth of artistic material that puts the city’s founding in context. More than one hundred portraits, landscapes, religious paintings, and devotional and secular objects—many never exhibited in the United States—reveal the visual culture that reflected and supported this region’s evolving world view, signaling how New Spain saw itself, its vast colonial and religious ambitions, and the conduct of everyday life.

Drawn primarily from Mexico’s great public and private collections of Spanish colonial art, the works on view in the exhibition, and reproduced in this catalogue, depict lives—and aspirations—on a threshold. They include portraits of leaders from political, social, and religious centers of power in northern Mexico and depictions of events that shaped San Antonio and South Texas as well as views into the domestic lives of citizens, the disciplines and devotions of religious orders, and minutely classified social hierarchies. Throughout, the works invoke the lineage and authority of mainland Spain, while revealing very local challenges and adaptations.

The San Antonio Museum of Art is a leader in the collection and presentation of art from Mexico. As early as 1931, its parent institution, the San Antonio Museum Association, hosted the traveling exhibition Mexican Arts, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1991, Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, also from the Met, drew record crowds. Its success led to a campaign to build a wing dedicated to the art of Latin America, especially Mexico. The Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Latin American Art, internationally recognized as among the world’s most comprehensive collections of art from that region, anchors San Antonio in its complex artistic legacy. More than five years in the making, this exhibition and catalogue could not have come together without the devotion and passion of Marion Oettinger Jr., the Museum’s curator of Latin American art. Oettinger’s vision and commitment, and the deft facilitation of curatorial assistant Gabriela Gámez, have been richly rewarded in the many important loans to the exhibition from private and public collections in Mexico and the United States. María Cristina García Zepeda, secretary of culture, Mexico; Diego Prieto, director of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH); and Lidia Camacho Camacho, director of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) were invaluable, gracious partners in this process.

The catalogue was supported by a grant from the Russell Hill Rogers Foundation. Early seed money for the project was provided by the William and Salomé Scanlan Foundation. Patricia Galt Steves provided crucial support for the exhibition itself. I am grateful for their passion for the arts of Mexico and for the San Antonio Museum of Art.

KATHERINE C. LUBER

Kelso Director

San Antonio Museum of Art

FOREWORD

In 1718, San Antonio was emerging as an active center of cultural exchange between different groups in northern New Spain. Today, Mexico and the United States join together in celebrating the three-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of San Antonio and the cultural richness this exchange has wrought.

The Secretaría de Cultura de México, through the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, has the honor of contributing its collections to this celebration through the exhibition San Antonio 1718: Art from Mexico as a tribute to the historical unity of that time and now. The Franciscan missionaries who founded San Antonio traveled far from the heart of New Spain, present-day Mexico City, to reach the north. There, with the help of the Coahuiltecs, the Payaya, and other indigenous groups, they built a group of missions whose cultural significance was acknowledged by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 2015.

Over the past three hundred years, Mexico and San Antonio have expanded and nourished their relationship through cultural dialogue, one of the most lasting sources for mutual understanding. More than seventy years ago, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México established its first foreign branch in the United States in the Plaza Mexico of San Antonio; later the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores developed San Antonio’s Instituto Cultural de México, the creation of the memorable museographer Fernando Gamboa. The cultural exchange has not ceased but has increased thanks to the energy of these and other binational cultural initiatives.

The community of San Antonio is intimately linked to Mexico—its people, its history, its culture. More than 60 percent of the city’s population shares Mexican roots that are expressed in language, education, arts, religion, culinary tastes, music, the spirit of fiesta and, above all, in family connections that have bridged political boundaries and flourished for more than three hundred years. Culture is the most direct and fruitful space for dialogue. It unites mutual understanding, friendship, and respect. This exhibition and catalogue document the closeness that results from a shared mutual respect for art.

MARÍA CRISTINA GARCÍA CEPEDA

Secretary of Culture

Secretaría de Cultura de México

PREFACE

We at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia want to express our excitement over the San Antonio Museum of Art’s important exhibition San Antonio 1718: Art from Mexico, organized to celebrate the tricentennial of San Antonio’s foundation. Our institute oversees more than one hundred national and regional archaeological, historical, and ethnological museums throughout Mexico as well as hundreds of important archaeological sites from the northernmost part of the Republic to Maya sites of Yucatán, Chiapas, and other regions in the south. In these museums and sites we research, preserve, exhibit, and publish much of the great cultural patrimony of Mexico. Our team oversees vast collections of art and artifacts for today’s population and for future generations.

We are delighted to be able to share with the San Antonio Museum of Art more than twenty-five paintings and sculptures from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that relate to the culture and societies of northern New Spain. Some are directly associated with South Texas and San Antonio, such as Andrés de Islas’s grand death portrait of Joseph de Escandón y Helguera, Count of Sierra Gorda, who among other things, founded over twenty communities along the Rio Grande, including Laredo, Matamoros, Reynosa, and other vital towns and cities. Another loan of similar importance is José Germán de Alfaro’s portrait of the Count Bernardo de Gálvez, governor of Louisiana and valuable ally of the American revolutionary forces against the British. Galveston, Texas, was so named in his honor. We are also pleased to be able to lend The Mystical City of God by the great Cristó bal de Villalpando, a work that some art historians feel provided visual support for the evangelization of the north.

Finally, the collaboration between our museum professionals and those from the San Antonio Museum of Art has been enormously valuable and all will benefit.

DIEGO PRIETO

Director

Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia de México

PREFACE

The heritage of New Spain is deeply rooted in some communities in the southern United States. In Texas, and particularly in the city of San Antonio, this cultural identity shared with Mexicans remains vigorous, dynamic, and proud in its multiple expressions. In 2018, San Antonio celebrates three centuries since its foundation; for this reason the Secretaría de Cultura de México through the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes is honored to collaborate in the exhibition San Antonio 1718: Art from Mexico, with the loan of important works of national patrimony from the Museo Nacional de Arte.

One of the main objectives of this exhibition is to provide an overview of the history of northern New Spain, through outstanding examples of painting, sculpture, and decorative objects. Among the works on loan from the Museo Nacional de Arte, of special interest to the exhibition is Martyrdom of Franciscans at Mission San Sabá, the monumental eighteenth-century painting attributed to José de Páez. This work, commissioned by the wealthy miner Pedro Romero de Terreros, faithfully illustrates—according to the testimonies of the time—a critical event in the history and evangelization of Texas: the destruction of the mission at the hands of the indigenous peoples on March 16, 1758. Also significant is the inclusion of the mid-eighteenth-century painting The Eternal Father Painting the Virgin of Guadalupe, attributed to the artist Joaquín Villegas. In addition to its remarkable aesthetic beauty and its historical importance, the painting presents one of the main cultural icons of Mexico, and those of Mexican heritage abroad, in the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The Secretaría de Cultura and the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes join in the celebration of San Antonio’s tricentennial and the cultural wealth and diversity we share. We congratulate the San Antonio Museum of Art for this initiative, destined to be a successful multi-institutional collaboration that will bring together our communities in joyful and formative experiences of art.

LIDIA CAMACHO CAMACHO

Director

Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes

Map Sources: Jacinto Quirarte, The Art and Architecture of the Texas Missions, 2002; National Historic Trail Association. Map illustration: Zeitgraph

Figure 1. Composite Map of 18th-century Northern New Spain

INTRODUCTION

MARION OETTINGER JR.

In the face of isolation, neglect, and danger, the people of San Antonio de Béxar created not only a permanent settlement but a sense of community that survived the test of the wilderness.

—JESÚS F. DE LA TEJA

Since the early part of the sixteenth century, the northernmost lands of New Spain, or Nueva España, had a reputation of being inhospitable, dangerous, and of little value, save their role in keeping alive the persistent myths of El Dorado, the City of Gold. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s memoirs recounting his epic eight-year walk (1528–36) across what is now Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona reinforced the idea that the region was not a welcoming place but did little to support the legends of abundant gold ready for the taking. Nonetheless, this land was claimed by Spain, and its native populations were tragically exterminated or subdued and converted to Catholicism.

By the early eighteenth century, San Antonio had become the northeastern boundary of a line that ran to the west through New Mexico, Arizona, and on to coastal California. San Antonio’s foundation and settlement was largely intended to secure a permanent bulwark against threats from the French, who persistently encroached from the east on Spanish claims. This rivalry between Spain and France, and later with the British, led to generations of European wars that played out in the Americas and elsewhere. San Antonio, for better or worse, unwittingly became a pawn in these European power theatrics, especially in South Texas, where they endured, in one form or another, over several centuries. Because of its pivotal location and the political context of its founding, San Antonio became a confluence of cultures, languages, and varying, often conflicting, traditions.

Communities on the northern frontier of New Spain were connected to its urban centers of political, military, and economic power by roughly defined roads that later became valuable thoroughfares, a core/peripheral strategy established by the Spanish to hold together a vast area and dispersed population. Known as caminos reales, or king’s highways, these busy roads moved information, troops, settlers, merchants, frontier politicians, missionaries, miners, artists, naturalists, and others into harsh, sparsely settled regions. Nomadic and seminomadic indigenous groups had claimed these same lands for millennia, using them as seasonal farms and wide-open hunting grounds. In every part of the north, scores of small tribes vigorously opposed the intrusion of European outsiders. Settlers, missionaries, and others were always accompanied by military troops for protection.

Caminos reales were established as early as the late sixteenth century and remained in use well into the nineteenth century. There were three main routes, each with numerous tributaries. El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the earliest of these highways, coursed roughly from Mexico City, through Querétaro, Zacatecas, Durango, and Chihuahua. From there, it traced through El Paso del Norte and ended in Santa Fe, New Mexico. El Camino Real de las Provincias Internas, begun in the late seventeenth century, ran from Mexico City through Querétaro, Zacatecas, Saltillo, Monterrey, Laredo, San Antonio, and parts of what is now northeastern Texas. The third route was El Camino Real de California, which traveled from Mexico City through Querétaro, Zacatecas, Tucson, and the missions of San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. All three of these routes supported religious, political, and economic development along the way.

El Camino Real de las Provincias Internas led to San Antonio, which became the site of five extraordinary eighteenth-century Franciscan missions—Mission San Antonio de Valero (1718, known later as the Alamo), Mission San José y San Miguel de Agauyo (1720), Mission Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción (1731), Mission San Juan Capistrano (1731), and Mission San Francisco de la Espada (1731). This string of missions, located on the banks of the San Antonio River and along the camino real, was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2015. Like other towns in northern New Spain, San Antonio was located far from the centers of colonial political, economic, and religious power. Its physical environment was demanding, subject to severe periodic droughts as well as devastating floods. Seminomadic indigenous tribes moved along its rivers and creeks to plant corn, beans, and squash, to gather seasonal fruits and berries, to hunt animals and birds, and to fish the streams. Initially, these groups were resistant to the presence of Europeans, but they later reluctantly integrated into the new system of governance. Lastly, the Spanish, as well as members of the local indigenous population, were under constant threat from the Apache and Comanche tribes, two of the most powerful empires in the southern plains, whose intimate knowledge of the environment and extraordinary skills at warfare were factors to be reckoned with well into the twentieth century.

San Antonio 1718: Art from Mexico is an exploration of the richly varied visual culture that was woven into the city’s dual origins in presidios defending Spain’s colonial interests and missions advancing Christian conversion at the dangerous edge of empire. The exhibition reveals the sweep of Spain’s religious, political, and economic ambitions and the everyday details of individual lives. Throughout, the art poses identities that are at once in continuity and in tension with Spain: pedigrees floated in the New World but changed by its practical environments, evangelical negotiations of local exigencies and Catholic teaching, objects melding indigenous and colonial skills and signifiers.

From earliest stages of planning the exhibition, we chose to explore Mexican art from the first century of San Antonio’s life, starting with its founding in 1718 and ending around 1818, close to the end of the colonial period and the early days of Mexican Independence. We also agreed to focus geographically on northern New Spain, since San Antonio’s founding and settlement were mainly consequences of colonial forces that came north from Mexico City, the center of the viceroyalty. From there we briefly touch on relevant communities north of the capital, such as Querétaro, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Saltillo, Monterrey, and other locations. Furthermore, we chose to include religious and secular art of the highest quality that represented both sophisticated and popular tastes of the period. Given the dearth of visual art from San Antonio itself, we searched for art that related to people, places, and institutions that had direct and indirect relevance to northern Mexico and South Texas, in general, and to San Antonio, in particular. With these temporal, spatial, and contextual guidelines in mind, we have assembled what we consider to be a superb collection of more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and other forms of artistic expression—most of them never before exhibited in the United States. Collectively they offer a rare look at the DNA of San Antonio’s culture, revealing themes that still emerge and retreat in different circumstances as the city grows.

The ravages of time, weather, war, and neglect have taken their toll on colonial art from San Antonio and Texas at large. By far, the most important visual expression remaining from that period is architectural. San Antonio’s five colonial missions, San Fernando Cathedral, and the Spanish Governor’s Palace, although modified significantly since their founding, retain substantial elements from the eighteenth century. Architectural sculpture, much of it still intact on the missions’ facades, most notably at Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, is remarkable in terms of physical condition, artistic design, and symbolic visual power. In addition, archaeological research has revealed traces of the original eighteenth-century interior and exterior wall paintings, and thoughtful, intelligent conservation has led to a careful reconstruction of these lively decorative features.

Nonarchitectural sculpture and paintings, however, are rare. Except for two or three important pieces of sculpture, nothing remains of the missions’ portable visual art with clearly defined provenance—works that once expressed the tastes and basic theological teachings of the Franciscans who served there. Through meticulous work with colonial inventories, the late art historian Jacinto Quirarte established the presence of several sculptures that can be safely traced to the missions during the eighteenth century.¹ One of these, a polychrome wood sculpture of San José, has been generously loaned to the exhibition by the Old Spanish Missions Center [plate 82]. Another, not present in the exhibition, is a baptismal font sculpted in local limestone, possibly by eighteenth-century artist Antonio Salazar—the same probable sculptor of the elegantly carved sacristy window at mission San José. This remarkable font is still in use at San Fernando Cathedral, where it is one of the most important artistic jewels in that historic structure’s crown.

In the absence of art used in the missions themselves, we began to look elsewhere for eighteenth-century visual artistic expressions that reflected the religious beliefs, governing individuals and institutions, aspects of social structure, material culture, and economic activities that would have been familiar to San Antonio residents, whether itinerant or permanent. Beginning in 2013, we visited dozens of museums in Mexico and the United States and eventually borrowed works that play key roles in telling our story from thirty institutional and private collectors.

The exhibition and catalogue are organized into three sections: People and Places, The Cycle of Life, and The Church.

People and Places

Because most painting and sculpture was made in service to the church, the crown, or to families of wealth, art depicting lives and situations of ordinary people was rare. One of the most important windows into the world of everyday public life, however, is through sets of paintings organized around New Spain’s infamous caste system (sistema de castas). We are grateful for the loan of one of the finest examples of this genre of Mexican painting [plates 1a–o]. Not only do these paintings illustrate social and racial hierarchies that had a complex function in the period’s practical and imaginary life, but they also provide the best visual data we have on gender, social organization, ethnicity, occupation, dress, home and workplace furnishings, architecture, and many other things.

Here, we also present portraits of political and economic power, representing people and families who helped shape the destiny of San Antonio. Eighteenth-century viceroys [plates 17, 18, 19] and potent military leaders are included, such as Joseph de Escandón y Helguera [plate 14], Bernardo de Gálvez [plate 15], Teodoro de Croix [plate 16], and Don Hugo O’Conor [fig. 2]. All knew Texas well, and some resided in San Antonio during the eighteenth century. O’Conor was one of the wild geese Irish who fled British Protestant-controlled Ireland to fight for Catholic Spain, and, like many of his countrymen, ended up in high positions in New Spain. In 1768, while living in San Antonio, O’Conor laid the cornerstone for the renovated and enlarged Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo.² He later founded the city of Tucson, Arizona. His successor, French-born Don Teodoro de Croix, also a part of Bourbon New Spain, spent time in San Antonio, where he convened meetings on tax and ranching reform and other topics during the 1770s. Later, de Croix was appointed viceroy of Peru [plate 16]. In the early 1700s, wealthy entrepreneurs, such as the Marquis of San Miguel Aguayo, who served as governor of Coahuila and Texas, was a major supporter of the settlement of