Doña María de los Dolores Gutiérrez del Mazo y Pérez

ca. 1796

José Campeche, who was largely self-taught, was Puerto Rico’s celebrated portrait and religious painter. His father was an enslaved Puerto Rican man of African heritage who purchased his freedom after working as a painter and gilder, and his mother was a white Spanish woman. Here, he depicted a Spanish-born member of Puerto Rico’s colonial elite, wearing diamonds and a white muslin chemise dress—then at the height of European fashion. This portrait was made when the sitter was twenty-one, around the time of her marriage to Don Benito Pérez (their names are written on the folded letters on the desk), a fellow Spaniard who would later become viceroy of New Granada, in South America.