In 2014 the Denver Art Museum held a symposium hosted by the Frederick and Jan Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art and co-organized by Donna Pierce and Emily Ballew Neff, Director of the Brooks Museum, Memphis. They assembled an international group of scholars to present recent research on portraiture in the Spanish colony of New Spain (Mexico) and the British colonies of North America. This volume presents revised and expanded versions of papers presented at the symposium.
Michael Schreffler (University of Notre Dame) opens the volume with a discussion of portraits of Cortés and Moctezuma in sixteenth-century New Spain. Clare Kunny (Art Muse, Los Angeles) examines portraits of Antonio de Mendoza (1490–1552), the first viceroy of Mexico. Susan Rather (University of Texas, Austin) analyzes portraiture in colonial British America and landscapes included in them. Karl Kusserow (Princeton University Art Museum) explores selfhood and surroundings in British American portraits.
Paula Mues Orts (National School of Conservation, Mexico) examines the portrait series commissioned and displayed in colonial Mexico by religious and civic organizations as a claim to power and prestige. James Middleton (independent scholar, New York) discusses clothing and accessories in New Spanish portraiture that allow a more precise dating of works. Jennifer Van Horn (George Mason University) follows the trans-Atlantic travels of portraitist Joseph Blackburn from England to New England and Bermuda. Kaylin Weber (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) explores the career of American Benjamin West and his trans-Atlantic move from Boston to London.
Elizabeth Kornhauser (Metropolitan Museum of Art) addresses the portraits of New England painter Ralph Earl, who struggled to fashion a new style for the young American republic. Michael Brown (San Diego Museum of Art) closes the volume by comparing the fate of portraits from New England and New Spain in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.
