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José Agustín Arrieta,1803-1874. Puebla City in the 19th Century

José Agustín Arrieta is, without a doubt, one of the most fascinating Mexican painters of the 19th century. Originally from Santa Ana Chiautempan in Tlaxcala, his family moved to the city of Puebla around 1807, where he trained as a painter and where he developed a vast production that encomed all artistic genres: religious painting, allegory, portraiture, genre scenes, landscape, and still life.

Just as the city of Puebla was the setting for Arrieta’s work; the social, religious, and cultural practices of its inhabitants were the main protagonists. His costumbrista scenes and still lifes were the delight of collectors in Puebla and the most famous writers of the time, such as Guillermo Prieto and Manuel Payno, who celebrated his “popular” and sometimes “picaresque” winks and his interest in representing common people in clear opposition to the themes cultivated at the Academia de San Carlos in the capital.

The peculiarity of his work pointed out by Prieto and Payno in the 19th century was decisive for its revaluation in the first half of the 20th century, when the post-revolutionary artistic literature catalogued him as one of the most important exponents of “popular painting,” ignoring his training in the Puebla Academy and the cultured models of Novohispanic and European painting that nurtured his work, and isolating him from the artistic system in which he produced it.

After a national tribute in 1994 with a major exhibition at Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, which brought together the largest amount of works to date and an important archival retrival was also carried out, this exhibition offers audiences a selection of his paintings from private and public collections for their enjoyment and to revisit the material and symbolic universe of Arrieta in the context of Puebla in the 19th century. The exhibition also invites us to reflect on the links with the religious painting of Novohispanic tradition and with the so-called “caste painting;” it proposes a reading of the genre scenes that aims to transcend the nationalist bias to reveal conflicts of class, race, and gender; and raises the urgent link of the paintings with the rich gastronomy of Puebla and the material culture produced by the regional manufactures.

“Producción Nacional realizada con el Estímulo Fiscal del Artículo 190 de la LISR (EFIARTES)”

José Agustín Arrieta | Artist

Angélica Velázquez Guadarrama | Curator

María José Rojas Rendón | Curator