Lot 67: Circle of Nicolás Enríquez (Mexican School 18th Century)

El Parián
titled (upper left) and numbered throughout, inscribed with corresponding numbers listing the castes inhabiting the city of Mexico at that time (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
21 3/4 x 35 1/2 in. (55 x 90.2 cm.)
Painted circa 1750s.

M. Romero de Terreros & Vinent (Marquis of San Francisco), Las Artes Industriales en la Nueva España, Banco Nacional de México, Mexico City, 1982, front cover (illustrated in color).
Artes de México. Nueva Epoca, Centro Histórico de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, no. 1, Fall, 1988-1989.
M. C. García Saíz, Las Castas Mexicanas, Mexico, 1989, p. 241.
A. Sotomayor, La Ciudad Antigua de México. Siglos XVI-XX, Olivetti, Mexico City, 1990, 101-109.

Private collection, Spain.
Angel Cristóbal collection, Mexico City.
Private collection, Mexico City.

We are grateful to art historian Guillermo Tovar y de Teresa for confirming the attribution of this work.

This work is part of the National Heritage of Mexico and cannot be removed from that country. Accordingly, it is offered for sale in New York from the catalogue and will not be available in New York. Delivery of the work will be made in Mexico in compliance with local requirements. Prospective buyers may contact Christie's Representatives in Mexico for an appointment to view the work.

Casta painting grew out of the need of Spanish functionaries to record their stays in the New World or New Spain as colonial Mexico was referred to. As such, they were early painted documents that were sent or taken to the Old World and provided "a multitude of information about daily life in New Spain, including food, clothing, and entertainment," as María Concepción García Sáiz has noted. (1) Scholar Ilona Katzew has noted, the genre provides a window into colonial society, and the structure of the capital city of Mexico, which had grown into one of the most important cities in the world by the late 17th century. Their production began in the early part of the 17th century; differences exist between the paintings executed at the beginning and end of the century. (2) The casta paintings are complex visual records of an epoch and offer many interpretations, especially on race and social interactions or mestizaje (the mixing of races).

Casta paintings aid in understanding the subject of race and identity and serve to explain relations between the three groups that made up that colonial society--Spanish, Indian and Blacks. Since the 1980s, their study and research, mostly by Mexican art historians, has brought to light correct attributions and in turn, set other investigations and classification in motion, and created a renewed interest in the colonial period in general. (3)

The paintings are constructed as a series of individual works or illustrations, which depict and classify the mixing of the three respective groups and their offspring. In El Parían is an extraordinary work that departs from this basic rule of representation and portrays the different racial groups together--mingling, in the setting of a city view. (4) The painting illustrates the "types of people that inhabit Mexico City;" they have been numbered, and explained on the back of the canvas. The composition depicts the city's inhabitants in a commercial milieu of a marketplace. El Parían was a market built after a fire struck and demolished what had been another within the city's Zócalo, or main square. (5) The name had its origin in the Manila Galleon that brought in exotic goods from Asia via Manila, another thriving Spanish colonial city and sailed back with luxury goods from New Spain. The marketplace, ideally, provided the means for greater social interaction as all castes came into contact in a less formal fashion.

By the 17th Century, Mexico City stood at the crossroads of major trade routes. Its ports received from and sent goods to Asia and also traded with the Old World. Its society, though highly stratified as these paintings demonstrate, provided goods and services that made Spain rich while at the same time, made possible the expansion of the colony as it prospered and grew successfully economically.

(1) J. J. Rishel & S. Stratton-Pruitt, The Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820, Publishing Department, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2006, p. 403.
(2) I. Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, Yale University Press, New Haven/London, 2004, p. 1.
(3) Katzew, p. 3.
(4) Ibid.
(5) M. C. García Sáiz, Las Castas Mexicanas: Un Género Pictórico Americano, Olivetti, Mexico, 1989, p. 241.

1 Español
2 Mestizo
3 Castiza
4 Yndia
5 Albino
6 Moro
7 Tornatras
8 Calpa Mulato
9 Jíbaro
10 Cuarterón
11 Morisco
12 Coyote
13 Española
14 Albarazado
15 Tente en el Aire
16 Cambujo
17 Zambayga
18 No inscription 19 Clérigos
20 Alabarderos
21 Yndios de la Sierra