Mexican Pottery Tableaux Trio | Diablo, Courting Couple, Burro Riders

Mexico, Jalisco, Tonala / Santa Cruz de las Huertas. A trio of hand-modeled earthenware tableaux from the pottery villages of Jalisco, each a small theater of village life painted in exuberant slips. In the first, a couple embraces on a scalloped pink bench while a horned, grinning Diablo leans over the backrest, hands on their shoulders, temptation made literal. The second seats a bearded man and a blue-robed woman on a yellow settee flanked by striped leaves, a great white bloom opening between them. The third sets two riders astride a fantastically striped burro, the forward figure clutching the reins beneath a broad sombrero. Modeled by hand rather than molded, the figures carry the black-line detailing, dotted hems, and wavy-banded plinths typical of Tonala and Santa Cruz de las Huertas workshops, where clay was pressed into playful, moralizing narrative. The devil-and-lovers group belongs to a long-lived Mexican folk theme in which the Diablo materializes at moments of courtship, a visual proverb warning that desire invites mischief. Related figures appear in Day of the Dead and Holy Week imagery, and the horned trickster is a staple of Santa Cruz de las Huertas modeling, the village outside Tonala where families such as the Panduro and Ortega lineages produced hand-built figural groups through the twentieth century. Their work is distinguished from the burnished, mineral-slip vessels of Tonala proper by its narrative ambition: benches, burros, wedding parties, musicians, and processions built up piece by piece, then painted in bright commercial pigments for the Tlaquepaque tourist market that flourished from the 1930s onward. Item # 204312

Estimate:$150

View all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorPorcelain & Pottery