Casta Painting: Xibano and Spaniard Produce Tornatras (De Xibano, y Española, produce Tornatras)
- unknown artist
- Mexican
Unknown artist, Casta Painting: Xibano and Spaniard Produce Tornatras (De Xibano, y Española, produce Tornatras), mid-1700s. Oil paint on canvas; 40½ × 31½ in. Gift of the Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer, 2013.333.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a new and unique genre of painting developed in Mexico. Designed to depict and classify the miscegenation occurring between the three main racial groups (Spanish, African, and Indigenous), these sets of paintings (usually fourteen to sixteen) contain a wealth of information on the daily life, diet, occupations, clothing, habits, utilitarian objects, and recreations of the era. Often commissioned for export to Spain, casta sets advertised the monetary wealth and natural abundance, in both products and people, of the American territories. The emphasis on ostentation and public display of wealth and abundance in castas became a conscious construct of Mexican self-image and can be associated with the growing nationalism of the late colonial period in Mexico.
At the same time, the new genre of casta painting also reflects the desire to reinforce the stratification of social classes, a European system that was fast breaking down in the Americas as a result of various factors, including racial mixing, access to wealth (especially among miners and merchants), and social mobility. The paintings increasingly attempted to reinforce upper-class conceptions of social stratification by privileging family groups that included a Spanish male—showing them early in the series (usually in numbers one to six) and furnishing them with details that suggested a more affluent lifestyle than that of other racial mixtures.
Like most castas, this casta portrays a family engaged in private activities, thus providing a rare glimpse into the daily life of eighteenth-century Mexico. The clothes and utensils reveal the hybridity of Mexican culture of the eighteenth century in their mix of European, Asian, and Mexican material culture. This example shows the casta family in a Rococo trompe l’oeil painted frame atop a low pedestal base. The label identifying the racial mixtures of the family is written on the base.
--Donna Pierce, 2015