Old Master Paintings & Spanish Colonial Art
Lot 287:
Sebastián Gómez (active between 1690 and 1699), called “el Mulato de Murillo”, was a Spanish Baroque painter who followed the style of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. Born in Granada and possibly the son of Moorish slaves, in the 18th century the belief spread that the painter had been Murillo’s slave. Thus, at the end of the century, the inventory of the collection of the Count of Águila included three paintings attributed to «Sebastián the slave of Murillo», and Ceán Bermúdez, in the Letter to a friend of his, on the style and taste of the painting, published in Cadiz in 1806, mentioned him among the Sevillian painter’s disciples, because “even though he was his slave”, he added, “he had also taught him the art of painting”. The legend was poetized by Hans Christian Andersen who in 1838 wrote the poem The Zombie Did It, dedicated to Murillo’s African slave who retouched and improved the master’s works at night. The two signed works that are known of him: the Virgen del Rosario con santos, dated 1690 and signed Iliberritanus, a work from the Dominican convent in Seville where Ceán still saw it (Seville Museum of Fine Arts), with a weak drawing and grandiloquent composition, and the Santa Rosalía de Viterbo in the Museum of Salamanca from the Franciscans of Écija, dated 1699, in which he uses the Granatense formula thus affirming the Granada origin, show characteristics of both Alonso Cano’s painting, which he would see before leaving his hometown, like de Murillo. By the same hand, a Coronation of the Virgin is preserved in the Museum of Cádiz and an Immaculate Conception in the Museum of Seville, in addition to four paintings in the National Museum of San Carlos in Mexico because, like other Andalusian painters, he dedicated part of his production to american market. Reference bibliography: “Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E. (1992). Pintura barroca en España 1600-1750. Madrid : Ediciones Cátedra. ISBN 84-376-0994-1”.
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