Don Diego Caballero

Isabella Stewart Gardner’s induction into the Hispanic Society in 1911 reflected more than a fascination with Spain alone. Her enthusiasm for Spanish speaking cultures also found expression closer to home in the art of Mexico. 

In 1871, long before she began to collect the works of celebrated European painters, Isabella Stewart Gardner attended a sale of Mexican art in Boston. The auction house offered “the noble pictures of Mexican masters” purchased from convents and monasteries dissolved by the Mexican government a decade earlier. For a mere thirteen dollars, Gardner bought this  pendant pair of portraits attributed to the eighteenth-century Mestizo painter Miguel Cabrera (1695–1768).

They depict Don Diego Caballero and his wife Doña Inés, a wealthy Spanish couple who owned the largest sugarcane plantation in New Spain and profited from the abundance of enslaved labor exploited by colonial settlers. In 1600, they founded a convent in Mexico City dedicated to Santa Inés. Intended for poor girls without dowries, it housed thirty-three nuns including the Caballeros’ nieces as well as a number of orphans.  Gardner’s paintings of its founders are probably local copies after originals by Baltasar de Echave Orio (about 1558 – about 1620).