Baltasar de Echave Ibía, The Road to Calvary, 1638. Oil paint on copper; 16¾ x 16⅞ in. Gift of the Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer, 2013.398.

image height: 16 3/8 in, 41.5925 cm; image width: 16 3/8 in, 41.5925 cm; frame height: 25 in, 63.5000 cm; frame width: 25 in, 63.5000 cm; frame depth: 3 in, 7.6200 cm

Artist's name in BLC; artist's name and date in BRC.

Mayer Center, Latin American Art

Latin American Art

This object is currently on view

Baltasar Echave Ibía was either the son or grandson of Baltasar Echave Orio who emigrated from Spain to Mexico where he founded a painting dynasty that endured for several generations and influenced subsequent artists. Echave Ibía’s son, Baltasar Echave Rioja, also became a painter.

Unlike his father/grandfather and his son, Echave Ibía is particularly known for small devotional paintings on copper, such as this example and its pendant of the Crucifixion (2013.397), also in the museum’s collection. He was also prone to including distant landscapes with bluish tints borrowed from the Flemish paintings being imported to Mexico in large quantities at this time, as seen in the distance in The Road to Calvary painting. Small figure groups in these two paintings make the composition seem crowded, but when viewed individually demonstrate a great range of dynamic characters in small intimate groupings, such as the women seen in the lower left of the Crucifixion piece and the animated young boys in the foreground of the Calvary piece.

– revised by Kathryn Santner, Frederick and Jan Mayer Fellow of Spanish Colonial Art, 2023

Provenance research is on-going at the Denver Art Museum. Please e-mail provenance@denverartmuseum.org, if you have questions, or if you have additional information to share with us.

• "Splendors of the Golden Age," Epcot Center, Walt Disney World, November 1985 - January 1990
• Exhibited "Splendors of Baroque Mexico," Denver Art Museum, December 1, 1985 - January 27, 1986
• "Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521-1821" Meadows Museum, Dallas, TX, 2004
• "Patronato, Painting from Baroque Mexico: Selected Works from the Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer," 2005, Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ
• "Collecting a New World: Spanish Colonial Art from the Jan and Frederick R. Mayer Collection," Apr 2-May 14, 2005, Lamont Gallery, Phillips Exeter Academy
• "The Arts in Latin America, 1492 - 1820," Philadelphia Museum of Art, Sept. 2006 - Sept. 2007 and August 5, 2007-October 28, 2007, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA