Mateo Cerezo

Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 22 May 1914, lot 107, for £31-10s to Morgan (as circle of Murillo);

In the collection of J.J. Morgan, U.K.;

Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 23 April 1917, lot 31, for £8-8s to Paris (as circle of Murillo);

In the collection of a Belgian aristocratic family;

With Derek Johns Ltd., London;

From whom acquired by the present owner in 2013.

Possibly A. Palomino, Museo pictórico y escala óptica, Madrid 1797, p. 567;

J.A. Sánchez Rivera, 'Más pinturas de Cerezo "el Joven"', in Boletín de la Institución Fernán González, vol. XC, no. 243, 2011, pp. 451-68, reproduced p. 454;

E. Lamas Delgado, 'Quelques considérations sur le thème du présage de la Passion en Espagne: à propos d’une image « très mystérieuse de la Nativité », tableau retrouvé de Mateo Cerezo (1637-1666)', in RIHA Journal 0033, 9 January 2012, reproduced fig. 1

According to the Spanish biographer Antonio Palomino, Mateo Cerezo was born in Burgos and at the age of just 15 moved to Madrid to work in the studio of Juan Carreño de Miranda, imitating his style to such a degree that often it was impossible to distinguish the work of master and pupil. The present work, with the unusual nocturnal setting to the New Testament scene, reveals the influence of Titian and Van Dyck on the artist’s work and may perhaps be identifiable with a painting described by Palomino: ‘de otro misteriosísimo pensamiento de la Natividad de Christo Señor nuestro con el Padre Eterno, y el Espíritu Santo, y algunos ángeles con la Cruz, y otros instrumentos de la Pasión, aludiendo á aquel texto de san Juan: Sic Deus dilexit mundum, etc., todo colocado con excelente gusto, y caprichoso concepto.’ Stylistically the painting shares certain similarities with the artist’s painting of The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine in the Prado, Madrid,¹ notably to the treatment of the putti in the upper left corner and the halo to the Virgin. 

We are grateful to Dr. Ismael Gutiérrez-Pastor for endorsing the attribution to Mateo Cerezo on the basis of photographs.

NOTE ON PROVENANCE

As a collector, Chilean architect Carlos Alberto Cruz, founder of The Apelles Collection, has wide-ranging interests that include Colonial Silver, Twentieth-Century Photography, incunabula and manuscripts, medieval liturgical objects, and contemporary Latin American art. When, in the early 1990s, his attention was captured by Golden Age Spain in all its cultural aspects, he was one of a tiny minority of collectors looking at Spanish paintings and drawings. His activity played an important role in the increasing prominence of the Spanish Golden Age, and coincided with a growing number of international exhibitions to which he lent generously. This was a new Golden Age, one of scholarly and museological interest - outside and inside of Iberia - in the visual arts of Spain. With greater subtlety and depth than ever before, Golden Age Spanish Art occupies an increasingly prominent place in the panorama of art history and collecting. Mr Cruz recognised that in an Italo-centric art historical discourse, Spanish visual arts were somehow “other” and it was their distinctive qualities - sometimes emphatic, sometimes restrained - that merited his special interest. 

¹ https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-mystic-marriage-of-saint-catherine/27b943e7-3279-4aad-843c-8c574ea90af9