Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed nowBy subscribing, you are agreeing to the privacy policy. Unsubscribe anytime.
Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Arts & Graphics / 19th C. Mexican Retablo Painting on Tin - Santo Nino de Atocha
Spanish Colonial, Mexico. A pilgrim child enthroned in a high-backed chair, painted in oils on a rectangular sheet of tinplate in the vernacular manner of Mexican devotional retablos. The Santo Nino de Atocha wears his familiar attributes: the wide plumed hat, the brown pilgrim's cape with esclavina embroidered in white scrollwork, a lace-trimmed collar and cuffs, a long blue gown, and sandals. He holds a flower-filled basket in one hand and, in the other, a staff hung with a gourd, the traveler's water flask. Swagged blue and coral curtains open upon the scene, with paired urns of blooms below. Such tin paintings, produced by anonymous artisan-painters for home altars, served as focus for household prayer and as ex-voto thanksgiving for prayers answered. The devotion originates in Atocha, a district of Madrid, but took its enduring form in Mexico. Legend holds that when Moorish captors at Atocha permitted only children to bring food to imprisoned Christians, a small pilgrim appeared with a basket that never emptied and a gourd of water that never ran dry. Transplanted to Plateros, Zacatecas, in the 18th century, the Santo Nino became the patron of miners, prisoners, travelers, and the gravely ill, and remains among the most widely venerated advocations in northern Mexico and the American Southwest. Painting on tinplate flourished after independence, when inexpensive rolled sheet metal reached Mexican markets in quantity and displaced the costlier gessoed wood panel. Working from engraved prints, provincial painters produced these small panels by the thousands for domestic altars, and their compact, saturated, deliberately frontal compositions have since been embraced as one of the defining bodies of Mexican folk art. Item # 204997
Estimate:$300
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorArts & Graphics
Estimate:
$300
Surrealist Watercolor and Gouache Painting of Nude Female in Field of Flowers
09/28/2026
$56
Est: $36
Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed now
Paul C. Mattson Watercolor and Ink Painting "Only the Flowers Remain," 1973
09/27/2026
$2
Saul Gefen Abstract Acrylic Painting "Love Flowers," 2026
09/27/2026
$70
Est: $70
