Adoration of the Shepherds

Juan Francisco de Aguilera was one of the most influential painters active in New Spain in the second decade of the eighteenth century. The fleeting light and atmospheric effects of his works marked a notable change from his predecessors and served as inspiration for a later generation of Mexican painters. Despite his importance to the development of painting in New Spain in the eighteenth century, documentary evidence about his activities is scarce. By 1722 he was a member of the academy formed by the brothers Juan and Nicolás Rodríguez Juarez in Mexico City, but nothing is known of him after that point. Two years earlier he had signed a large painting depicting the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception with Jesuits (Museo Nacional de Arte, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City), which was presumably commissioned by the Jesuits for one of their precincts. Aside from a handful of further signed paintings, of which the present painting appears to be a new addition, few works can be securely attributed to him.