Casta Painting: De Castizo y India produce Coyote
- unknown artist
Unknown artist, Casta Painting: De Castizo y India produce Coyote, about 1760. Oil paint on canvas laid on panel; 31½ × 24⅜ in. Gift of the Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer, 2013.306.
Invented at the beginning of the 18th century to attempt to scientifically categorize the various racial mixtures occurring in the Americas, casta, or caste, paintings are unique to colonial Latin America and depict a family group. This example shows a castizo (three-quarters Spanish, one quarter Indigenous) man with his full-blood Indigenous wife and their daughter who is categorized as a coyote. Such casta paintings allow a glimpse of the clothing and customs of the lower classes in colonial Mexico. Both mother and daughter wear the black velvet beauty patches (chiqueadores) popular among Mexican women of all classes in the 1700s. Probably originally devised to cover smallpox scars, they became a beauty item and the mother here wears an example cut out in rococo design. Both women wear the three-quarter length sleeves with ruffle and pointed bodice popular all over Europe and the Americas (including in the British colonies) in the mid 18th century. The mother wears the traditional Indigenous rectangular rebozo, or shawl, around her shoulders that was adopted by upper class women in Mexico and even in Spain. The daughter wears another Indigenous-style garment, the huipil, over her blouse. The mixture of European and Indigenous fashions was typical among all classes in colonial Mexico, particularly in the 18th century when women of the upper classes in Europe also dressed in the attire of the lower classes (such as Marie Antoinette in her milkmaid outfit).
-- Donna Pierce, 2015
- "Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521-1821," April 3 - July 25, 2004, Denver Art Museum.
- Exhibited, "Telling New Mexico," June 9, 2010 - August 3, 2012, Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe, NM
