Pascual Pérez: Pueblan Painter

In a series of posts on our sister blog, we looked at the Pueblan painter Miguel de Mendoza, a native of the Mixteca region of Oaxaca, whose work is found both in Puebla and Oaxaca.

Another painter of reputedly humble Oaxacan/Mixtecan origins who later achieved prominence in the Puebla region and beyond was Pascual Pérez (1663—1731) popularly known as El Mixtequito (the little Mixtecan). 

   Although a mestizo, or possibly belonging to the indigenous nobility like his contemporary Mendoza, and with a former slave for a wife (whose freedom he bought for 230 gold pesos), Pérez became leading light in the Pueblan school of painting both as an artist and guild official, His interment in Puebla cathedral at his death attests to his high artistic and social standing.
   Active in the later 1600s and early 1700s, his style changed with the times over these transformative decades in Mexican art. The lingering naturalism and tenebrista effects in his early work gradually gave way, with the arrival of the new century, to the influence of the European high baroque.
   Ambitious compositions on a grand scale of artists like Rubens, also affected Pérez’ Mexican contemporaries like Juan Correa and Cristóbal de Villalpando. While the Andalusian palette and
Mannerist print sources still played a role among Pueblan painters, the sharper, more realistic focus of the early baroque gave way to a softer, more idealized manner, without losing the popular, genre aspects beloved of earlier colonial painters and muralists. 
   In many ways the Puebla school more fully embodies a truly national as well as regional style, and one that is increasingly inclusive if we consider the humbler native origins of artists like Correa, Mendoza and Perez, and Miguel Cabrera in the generation to follow.

   His prolific output covers a broad range of religious subjects and is found in churches and collections across the city of Puebla and its environs, and beyond, as far as Mexico City and Santa Fe, New Mexico:
Churches:
San José de Puebla
San Gregorio Zacapechpan,
St. Francis Cathedral, Santa Fe
Templo Conventual del Carmen, Cd. de Puebla
Templo de Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria y de Guadalupe Xonaca, Puebla
San Andrés Cholula
San Pedro Cholula
Collections:
Museo de Arte Religioso Santa Mónica, Puebla
Museo Universitario de Puebla
Museo Casa del Alfeñique, Cdad de Puebla
Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City
Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City

We will cover Pérez' works in these locations, starting next with a review of his paintings in the church of San Andrés Apostol, in Cholula, Puebla—one of the largest and most varied collections of his work.

text © 2018 Richard D. Perry