The Painter of El Tocuyo

The unsigned master

There are in El Tocuyo —and scattered today through Venezuelan collections and colonial convents— more than 100 religious paintings that share a single hand: a painter trained in the manner of the Sevillian Baroque (Murillo, Zurbarán, Pacheco, the Sevillian School) who worked between 1682 and 1702, leaving behind a coherent body of work of high quality but which he never signed.

This master is known to historiography as "The Painter of El Tocuyo" (El Pintor del Tocuyo), a designation owed largely to the critic Alfredo Boulton, who reconstructed the catalog of his work and gave him his place in the history of Venezuelan art.

Style and themes

The Painter of El Tocuyo's work is entirely religious: virgins, christs, saints, and Gospel scenes. Its distinctive features:

• Sevillian influence: monumental composition, heavy drapery, an earthen palette and deep reds.
• Soft, almost devotional physical types, in the manner of Murillo.
• Dramatic illumination with deep shadows, in the line of Zurbarán.
• Local supports: many of his paintings are executed on Lienzo Tocuyo —the cotton fabric produced in the city— a local alternative to European linen also adopted by painters in Quito and Peru.
• Fine finish of the face, with somewhat more schematic hands and drapery: the mark of a workshop that repeated established formulas.

Who was he?

The painter's identification remains an open question. The most strongly held hypothesis points to Francisco de la Cruz, a painter active in El Tocuyo for whom colonial documents exist and to whom some specialists attribute the bulk of the corpus. But there is no signature or direct contract linking De la Cruz to specific paintings: the attribution is based on style, period, and place.

Other hypotheses have pointed to a painter trained in Seville and emigrated to the Province of Venezuela, or to a circle of local painters rather than a single master.

The context: El Tocuyo, a hub of colonial art

That seventeenth-century El Tocuyo could host a pictorial school comparable in quality to that of Quito or to provincial Seville says a great deal about the city's economic and cultural importance in colonial times:

• Prosperous sugar mills and haciendas generated surpluses and demanded religious art for churches and private oratories.
• Four convents —Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Jesuits— maintained a steady flow of commissions.
• The Inquisition Commissariat —reporting to Cartagena— oversaw iconographic orthodoxy.
• The production of Lienzo Tocuyo provided cheap material support.

The Painter of El Tocuyo —whether or not he was Francisco de la Cruz— was the natural product of that cultural ecosystem.

Alfredo Boulton's rediscovery

During the eighteenth, nineteenth, and much of the twentieth centuries, the paintings were dispersed across sacristies, convents, and private homes, with no one noticing the coherence of the whole. It was Alfredo Boulton —the great Venezuelan art historian of the twentieth century— who, in his studies of colonial art, reconstructed the corpus, proposed the designation "Painter of El Tocuyo," and inscribed him in the history of Spanish American art.

Where to see his work

A significant portion of the Painter of El Tocuyo's work is preserved today in:

• The Casa de la Cultura "Don Eligio Anzola Anzola" (formerly the Franciscan Convent), home to the colonial museum of El Tocuyo.
• Colonial churches of the Morán Municipality and of Lara.
• Private and public collections in Caracas (Museo de Arte Colonial Quinta de Anauco, Galería de Arte Nacional).

The 1950 earthquake destroyed part of the corpus, but the rescued paintings have been restored and remain a testament to the artistic splendor of colonial El Tocuyo.

His value

The Painter of El Tocuyo demonstrates that the colonial Venezuelan provinces —and El Tocuyo specifically— produced art of international caliber in the heart of the seventeenth century. His existence belies the cliché of colonial Venezuela as an artistically poor periphery: here, in a city of a few thousand inhabitants, worked a master who speaks visually with Murillo and Zurbarán.

He is one of the most fascinating mysteries —and one of the most promising for future researchers— of El Tocuyo's cultural heritage.