Casta Painting

1777

Barreda y Ordóñez, Ignacio María (active 1770-1790)

Madrid, ESP, Real Academia Española de la Lengua (current location)

Casta or “caste” paintings depict, in more explicit terms than almost any other colonial objects, the outcomes of inter-ethnic mixing. Typically, as in this example from Mexico, casta paintings comprise sixteen scenes that register, through the presentation of family groups, the progressive dilution of “pure” Spanish, Indian, and African blood.

In the upper left corner, a well-dressed Spanish man extends his arms to receive his child from his indigenous mate. The text beneath reads, "De Español, y Indio, Mestizo o Cholo" (From Spaniard and Indian, Mestizo or Cholo). In these painted settings, Spaniards have the highest social standing, usually appearing in the first panel of each series while across successive scenes, corresponding to the rungs of the social ladder, the pairs become darker and increasingly poor. Tracing across the top from left to right and then down the caste hierarchy, the painting registers the generations of children, some of whom are identified as castizo, español criollo, and mulatto. While each scene in this painting resembles a family portrait, casta paintings represent “types” rather than named individuals, and often, the same arrangement of postures, clothing and accouterments appears in multiple paintings. Inscriptions set within or near to each painted panel identify the names assigned each new “caste” created. As images of darker-skinned people appear, so too do more scenes of explicit poverty and violence. In the lowest compartment of all, the painter presents “barbarian” indigenous people, called mecos. As in other casta paintings, they are shown as so “barbaric” and “uncivilized” as to be beyond the realm of mixing. This text that runs across the bottom of the painting records the names of the painter and patron and the date of the work.

Ignacio María Barreda created this oil-on-canvas painting for a friend, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Rafael de Aguilera y Orense, a military man who spent part of his career in New Spain.

This painting is oil on canvas. It measures ca. 30 x 19 in. (ca. 77 x 49 cm).

Casta paintings were made in both New Spain and Perú in the 18th century, primarily for patrons of the upper classes—often Spaniards who had been in the colonies or had strong curiosity about the Americas. Today this painting hangs in the Real Academia Española in Madrid.

This desire to classify the people of the New World has many origins. One intellectual source can be found among Enlightenment thinkers who sought to find (or create) order and rational explanations for both the natural and social world. Such explanations were popular in Spanish America in the latter part of the 18th century. Another source was social anxiety about a person’s place in the increasingly complex and heterogeneous world of the colonies. Although the names assigned to distinct “castes” in each panel suggest that ethnic mixing was carefully tracked and documented, this is far from the case. Documents from the 18th century that deal with racial classifications, like parish records, generally use five terms: Spanish, Indian, black, mulatto, and mestizo. And members of these groups could slip between them at times. Thus casta paintings are, to some degree, elaborate fictions. Their initial popularity may have stemmed from an ability to represent “order” or “reason” for 18th-century viewers. And today, they give visual expression to the complex process of mestizaje among groups that inhabited New Spain.

Reproduced courtesy of the Real Academia Española de la Lengua

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Carrera, Magali. 2003. Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin. University of Texas Press.

Cope, R. Douglas. 1994. The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Deans-Smith, Susan. 2005. "Creating the Colonial Subject: Casta Paintings, Collectors, and Critics in Eighteenth-century Mexico and Spain." Colonial Latin American Review 14 (2): 169-204.

Earle, Rebecca. 2016. "The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification and Colonialism." William and Mary Quarterly 73 (3): 427-466.

García Sáiz, Concepción. 1989. Las castas mexicanas: Un género pictórico americano. Milan: Olivetti.

Katzew, Ilona. 2004. Casta Painting: Images of Race in 18th-century Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press.