Josefa de Óbidos

Josefa de Ayala (b. Seville, 1630–d. Óbidos, 1684), commonly known as Josefa de Óbidos, is one of the few documented professional women artists of early modern Iberia, and arguably the most celebrated painter of the Portuguese baroque. She was the daughter of Baltazar Gomes Figueira, a Portuguese painter who was well known at the time for his still lifes and landscape backgrounds. Baltazar Gomes developed part of his career in Seville, where Josefa de Óbidos was born in 1630 (the painter Francisco Herrera the Elder was her godfather) and where she lived for an indeterminate number of years before 1646, when she signed and dated her first documented works, and only a few years after Portugal proclaimed its independence from Spain. Based in the Portuguese town of Óbidos from 1646 until her death in 1684, Josefa created engravings, small-format oil paintings on copper, large altarpieces for churches and monasteries, still lifes, portraits, and individual devotional paintings—an impressive variety of formats and subjects of which more than 100 works remain. Although she sometimes collaborated with her father, Josefa de Óbidos kept her own workshop after attaining the legal title of “donzela emancipada” (emancipated maidenba), which allowed for her independence. Her fame grew to mythical proportions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a number of biographers stressed her feminine piety and celibate isolation—she never married. For much of the twentieth century, scholars built on these romantic notions, emphasizing the presumed folk provincialism, use of surface decoration, and sentimental naiveté of her work. They also placed undue weight on her still lifes (now considered a small portion of her oeuvre) and on the presumed mysticism of her works, exaggerating the isolated context of Óbidos—in reality, a town with important links to the court. From the 1970s, and thanks to the pioneering work of Vítor Serrão, Luís de Moura Sobral, and Joaquim Oliveira Caetano in Portugal, and Edward J. Sullivan in the United States, as well as the invaluable contribution of a number of exhibitions, Josefa de Óbidos’s career and work have undergone a profound reassessment through rigorous archival research and the introduction of new approaches taking into account gender, global connections, and material culture. The painter is now seen as a defining player of the Portuguese baroque who engaged with artistic, religious, and political concerns of utmost currency in the Portuguese culture of her day, making her one of the most characteristic, prolific, and original artists of early modern Portugal, although scholarship outside of Portugal is still limited.