Don José María Estrada, Padre de la Independencia de la Pintura Mexicana

Guadalajara: Instituto, Tecnológico de la Universidad de Guadalajara, 1957. First Edition (presumed; no prior editions or printings cited). Quarto in stff paper wraps; 65 pages of text and approx 50 unapged pages, chielfy in full color. A few small worm holes from entire text black, affecting the plates; wraps soiled; else binding tight. Overall veery good(-) to good(+) thus. Paperback.

In Spanish. Zuno, José Guadalupe, 1891-1980. 2,000 copies printed (colophon) ¶ José Guadalupe Zuno Hernández (1891–1980) was a Jalisco painter, caricaturist, lawyer, and politician. As governor of Jalisco from 1923 to 1926 he refounded the Universidad de Guadalajara, and he wrote some eighty books; his daughter María Esther married President Luis Echeverría. Here he champions José María Estrada, the nineteenth-century Guadalajara portraitist. Estrada was born in Guadalajara late in the 1700s, trained under José María Uriarte, and entered the city’s Academia de Artes in 1827. He painted straight onto blank canvas without preparatory drawings, and his sitters were mostly the provincial middle class, including the dead children for whom such portraits are now best known. Zuno’s claim, that Estrada was the father of Mexican painting’s “independence,” belongs to the twentieth-century revaluation of provincial painting made outside the academic canon, which was cast as an authentically Mexican art and a forerunner of the muralists. The painter Roberto Montenegro, a fellow Jaliscan, collected Estrada and held him in very high regard. Estrada is now represented in major Mexican museums, including the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), and is regarded as one of the most important regional painters of nineteenth-century Jalisco. A Guadalajara edition of 1971 carries a prologue by Luis García Carrillo, Zuno’s close friend and fellow member of the Centro Bohemio tertulia of the 1910s.