This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Josefa de Óbidos.
Born: 20 February 1630, Spain
Died: 22 July 1684
Country most active: Portugal
Also known as: Josefa de Ayala Figueira, Josefa em Óbidos, Josefa de Ayalla
Josefa de Óbidos was the most celebrated female artists in 17th century Portugal. She excelled in several different fields of arts and crafts production but she is best known as a painter of still lifes and devotional narratives. Óbidos’s art typically reflected her strong Catholic faith, and she is today considered one of the most authoritative exponents of the Baroque style in Portuguese art. Moreover, in a situation that was highly unusual for a woman of her time and place, Óbidos never married, preferring a life of independent means. Indeed, she ran her own successful studio and became wealthy from many prestigious public and private commissions.
Childhood
Josefa de Óbidos was baptized Josefa de Ayala Figueira, in Seville, Spain, in 1630 – she is presumed to have been born in that same year and place. She was one of eight children born to Baltazar Gomes Figueira, a painter from the village of Óbidos in Portugal, and an Andalusian noblewoman named D. Catarina de Ayala y Cabrera. Óbidos’s parents had met in the 1620s while Baltazar was in Seville studying with the artists Juan del Castillo, Juan de Roelas, and Francisco de Zurbaran. It is known that her godfather was Francisco de Herrera the Elder, an illustrious painter, and one time master of Diego Velázquez, who was working in Seville at this time. Baltazar adopted a tenebrist style that was a feature of Spanish Baroque painting.
Figueira did not find commercial success as a painter and was arrested for debt in 1633. The family then relocated to, Portugal, settling at the Quinta da Capeleira in Óbidos. Historian Lucas Brandao writes, “this departure would not have taken place without first being sponsored by Francisco de Herrera, the founder of the School of Seville, a pictorial movement that would be so influential in the development of Western European painting. In fact, its influence on Josefa’s own painting can be seen, who also adopted the Baroque and the perfection of its expressions as a bulwark of her creation”. Óbidos’s had shown a keen interest in painting from as early as the age of four and spent many hours with her father in his studio. Her father also owned an impressive collection of prints; father and daughter studied these for artistic inspiration. The young Óbidos was especially drawn to painting still lifes featuring flowers and fruit.
Early Training
Shortly after the Portuguese monarchy was restored in 1640, Óbidos’s family moved to the riverside city of Coimbra (the country’s capital from 1139 to 1260). She formally apprenticed under her father, learning to paint landscapes, still lifes, and religious works. In 1644, while her father was in the town of Santa Cruz working on a commission for an altarpiece in the church of Nossa Senhora da Graça, Óbidos boarded at the Augustinian Convent of Santa Ana (in Coimbra) where she received religious training (but without taking Holy Orders).
According to art historian Edward J. Sullivan, Óbidos’s first known work, Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1646), was “a sophisticated etching [that] has a Rubensian quality attesting to the young artist’s study of northern prints”.
Óbidos, still aged just 16, first inscribed works – signed Josefa Ayala – were dated 1646. Produced while she was still residing at the convent, they were highly skilled engravings of St. Catherine and St. Peter. In 1647, she completed her first signed paintings, which included a small work on copper of the Mystical Marriage of St. Catharine, produced for the Augustinian Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, and a second painting on copper of a Nativity Scene with St. Francis and Saint Clare Adoring the Newborn Christ.
Mature Period
At some point before 1653, the artist was back in Óbidos with her family. There, she executed an allegory of Wisdom to be included in the Novos Estatutos da Universidade de Coimbra (the Book of Rules for the University of Coimbra), for which her father, who was by now a highly regarded painter himself, was designing the frontispiece. Still aged just 23, Óbidos accepted commissions for a number of important works for churches and convents around central Portugal, including five panels for the Saint Catherine altarpiece of the Santa Maria church in Óbidos in 1661, the altarpiece of Saint Theresa of Ávila in the Carmelite Convent of Cascais in 1672-73, and an altarpiece for the Church of the Mercy of Peniche in 1679.
Óbidos also took on commissions from private clients for portraits and still lifes, and became a member of the Lisbon Academy of Art. She was commissioned to produce an important engraving in Coimbra before working on some of Portugal’s most prestigious religious buildings, including the great monasteries of Alcobaça, Batalha and Evora. She also painted the portraits of members of the Portuguese royal family. As her reputation continued to grow, noble women, having visited the nearby thermal baths, often made a point of visiting her studio. She never married (and is thought to have lived her life as a virgin) and managed to live comfortably and independently from the earnings from her paintings. She also made a shrewd businesswoman, purchasing and leasing land and acting as a money lender.
Referring to Damiao de Froes Perym’s (the pseudonym for the monk, Fray Joao de San Pedro) 18th century publication, Life Stories of Woman Artists, critic Julia K. Dobbs writes, Óbidos “is justifiably included in Froes Perym’s catalogue of illustrious women since she was, and still is, the best-known artist of seventeenth-century Portugal”. She adds, however, that an “intriguing and somewhat puzzling” aspect of her life story is that “the artist is said to have been invited to serve the Queen at the Portuguese court [yet] despite the advantages of such a position [she] evidently turned it down”. Dobbs states, one “wonders if the public reaction to and royal demands on Ayala as a painterly ‘curiosity,’ noted twice by the biographer, might have been uncongenial to her apparently introspective nature”.
Late Period and Death
In the 1660s, Óbidos’s brothers, José Ortiz and António, took religious vows. Her sister Luisa, with whom she was closest, and who had been sickly since childhood, died on January 1, 1664. According to Joaquim Oliveira Caetano, director of the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon, “From then on, Josefa’s painting seems to have turned again to smaller formats painted on copper, and to the still-life models […] and, above all, to the creation of standard images of the Christ Child, the Infant Saint John the Baptist, and the Mystic Lamb”. Among Óbidos’s best known, and most original, still lifes, “The Months”, were produced from around 1668. These reveal the artist’s humble (free of symbolism) relationship with everyday objects. Following her father’s death in 1674, she became obliged to undertake a higher number of public commissions in order to support her elderly mother and two orphaned nieces (with whom she had been living for some years in a large house she had purchased on Rua Direita in Óbidos).
In her will, dated June 13, 1684, Óbidos is identified as a “virgin who never married” and who had been “emancipated with the consent of her parents”. She passed away on July 22, 1684, at the age of just fifty-four. She was buried in the Church of São Pedro in Óbidos. Art historian Julia K. Dabbs notes that she was laid to rest “in the habit of a Poor Clare, indicating that she may have been a lay member of the Franciscan order”.
The Legacy of Josefa de Óbidos
Josefa de Ayala de Óbidos produced around 150 paintings during her lifetime, making her one of the most prolific, and the most important, female artist of the Baroque period in Portugal. Following her inclusion in Damião Froes Perym’s 1736 anthology, Life Stories of Woman Artists, who called her “honest [and] talented”, she was acknowledged by the Portuguese writer and painter Félix da Costa Meesen for being “acclaimed far and wide, especially in the neighboring countries [as] someone who practiced the perfections of art to notable applause”.
However, Óbidos remained somewhat forgotten until 1949 when Lisbon’s Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga put on a career retrospective of her work. Though dismissed as provincial by the noted Portuguese writer Miguel Torga – “Oh! this Portuguese race that does not deliver a painter who is worth the while” – as the century progressed, critical interest in her work increased dramatically with further retrospectives held to acclaim in Europe and America. Contemporary scholars, including Rachel Zimmerman and Joaquim Oliveira Caetano, assert that her “feminine condition”, along with the “provincial” label attached to her oeuvre, was of critical interest in and of itself. But, says Caetano, “her painting goes far beyond being a curious case of ‘gendered art’ [and that] Josefa painted and lived her life with unusual independence, and truly created her own artistic language in Portuguese Baroque”.