Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, UK, since at least 1981

Literature
J.O.Caetano et al, Josefa de Óbidos and the Invention of the Portuguese Baroque, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, 2015, pp. 69-70

This small devotional painting dates from a remarkably early period in Josefa de Ayalla's career as she would have been only 16 or 17 at the time it was painted. Clearly The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine was a successful composition for her as, in the catalogue of the 2015 exhibition of her work at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, Joaquim Oliveira Caetano mentions that four versions are recorded (pp. 69-70). The whereabouts of two are known, one being in the collection of the MNAA, Lisbon, signed and dated 1647 (inv. 197 min), and the other in the National Museum of Soares dos Reis, Porto, signed, but undated (inv. 244 Pin). The Lisbon painting comes from the collection of King Luis I of Portugal and the version in Porto, from the Monastery of Santa Cruz de Coimbra. We know of two other paintings of this subject from early records. The 18th century art historian Cyrillo Wolkmar Machado mentioned a further copper dated 1647 which belonged, successively, to the collection of Gonçalo José Silveira Preto, then to the art dealer Francisco Cypriano and, in 1810, was sold to an English merchant (see Colleção de Memórias..., 1826, p. 62). Another painting on copper of this subject is referred to in the Catalogue Illustré de la Collection des Objects d'Art Qui Composent le Cabinet de Mr. Antoine Jos. Essingh, Cologne, 1865, p. 61, n. 276. As the current whereabouts of these last two works is unknown, it is possible that the present work corresponds with one of them.

Born in Seville to a father who was himself a painter, Josefa moved back to Portugal with her family when she was four, settling in the small town of Óbidos, her father's birthplace. During her formative years as a painter she frequently based her compositions on engravings after earlier masters, the source of the present work being Titian's 1528 Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine painted for the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice. It was engraved by Cornelis Cort in 1565 with the image inverted, as it appears in Josefa's painting.

Her output encompassed still lifes in the manner of her father, as well as religious works and engravings, and she seems to have been as comfortable undertaking large altarpieces, such as the one commissioned for the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, as painting miniatures and small-scale devotional works on copper like the present Mystic Marriage. There is a noticeable influence of Zurburán's work both in the facial types Josefa employed and in the still life elements; indeed, she would have been familiar with his work as early inventories list several of his panels in the collection of her father and other family members.

We are grateful to Joaquim Oliveira Caetano for his assistance in cataloguing this work.