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Accession #	2012.45
Artist	José Campeche
Title	Doña María de los Dolores Gutiérrez del Mazo y Pérez
Date	ca. 1796
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	32 11/16 x 26 in. (83 x 66 cm) frame (frame measured 2022): 45 1/4 × 30 1/4 × 6 1/2 in. (114.9 × 76.8 × 16.5 cm) frame: 43 5/16 x 29 1/2 x 4 1/2 in. (110.1 x 74.9 x 11.4 cm)
Credit Line	Gift of Lilla Brown in memory of her husband, John W. Brown, by exchange
Location	Visible Storage: Case 15, Screen A (Paintings)

Curatorial Remarks: About this Brooklyn Icon
The Brooklyn Museum is commemorating its 200th anniversary by spotlighting 200 standout objects in its encyclopedic collection.

José Campeche, who was largely self-taught, was Puerto Rico’s most celebrated portraitist and religious painter in his lifetime. His background was unlike that of most of his sitters, including the subject of this portrait. Campeche’s 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. There are relatively few paintings by Campeche in museums in the United States.

In this work, Campeche depicts the 21-year-old bride of Don Benito Pérez, who would later become the viceroy of New Granada in South America. A Spanish-born member of Puerto Rico’s colonial elite like her husband, she wears diamonds and a white muslin chemise dress, a style then at the height of European fashion. Such expensive self-fashioning, enabled by an extractive economy, was among the most significant ways that Spaniards living in the colonies expressed their high social status.