Juan de Valdés Leal (Seville 1622-1690)
Juan de Valdés Leal (Seville 1622-1690)

Portrait of the Cordoban intellectual and writer Don Enrique Vaca de Alfaro (1635-1685), bust-length, in a brown coat

Details
Juan de Valdés Leal (Seville 1622-1690)
Portrait of the Cordoban intellectual and writer Don Enrique Vaca de Alfaro (1635-1685), bust-length, in a brown coat
oil on canvas
23 1/8 x 18 ½ in. (58.5 x 47 cm.)
Provenance
Private collection, Córdoba, until 1880.
Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 28 June 1974, lot 52, when acquired by the family of the current owner.
Literature
A. Palomino, Museo pictórico y escala óptica, Madrid, 1724, p. 1053.
J. Valverde, Dos pintores sevillanos en Córdoba, Sarabia y Valdés Leal, Madrid, 1963, p. 17.
D. Kinkead, Valdés Leal, New York, 1978, pp. 79 and 350-1.
E. Valdivieso, Historia de la pintura sevillana, Seville, 1986, p. 263.
E. Valdivieso, Juan de Valdés Leal, Seville, 1988, pp. 56-7 and 213, fig. 32, no. 24, where dated c. 1654-6, the artist's second Cordoba period.
Exhibited
Birmingham, Alabama, Spanish Splats, 1951-52.
Palm Beach, Florida, Spanish Painting, 1952, no. 23.
Syracuse, New York, Spanish Art, 1952, no. 7.
Bordeaux, L'âge d'or espagnol, 1955, no. 31.
Denver, Collector's Choice, 1958, no. 61.
Madrid, Museo del Prado; Seville, Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla, Juan Valdes Léal, 1991, no. 11.

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Katharine Cooke
Katharine Cooke

Lot Essay

This portrait is one of the first painted by Valdés Leal during his career in Córdoba. The sitter, Don Enrique Vaca de Alfaro, seems to have known the artist personally as a member of the city’s cultured and intellectual elite. He was a cultivated man, born into a noble family, who had penned of a number of historic and intellectual works including his panegyric Varones ilustres de Córdoba which detailed the lives of fifty-nine of the city’s most illustrious figures and a volume of poetry, the Lira de Melpómene, printed in the city in 1666.

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