Andrés de Islas

Andres de Islas worked in Mexico City during the second half of the eighteenth century. Museum and gallery sources place his documented activity between roughly 1753 and 1783, though these are working dates drawn from dated commissions and surviving works, not confirmed birth or death records. One specialist dealer, Robert Simon Fine Art, gives an approximate life span of circa 1730 to circa 1783 as a scholarly estimate; this figure is not corroborated by an archival source and should be treated as a hedge rather than a confirmed date.

He is described in period and scholarly sources as primarily a portraitist who also produced small scale religious works and altarpieces. Documented commissions include two portraits of Bishop Juan de Palafox in the bodega of the Capilla de Guadalupe at the Catedral de Mexico, a portrait of Jose de Escandon in the Capilla de Guadalupe of the Seminario de Queretaro, and portraits of King Charles III, Viceroy Antonio Maria de Bucareli, and the First Count of Regla, held at the Direccion del Monte de Piedad in Mexico City. In 1774 he produced a complete series of sixteen casta paintings, now held by the Museo de America in Madrid; a comparable pair of casta paintings once catalogued generically as "Mexican School, 18th Century" was later reattributed to him by the colonial art specialist Alejandro de Antuñano Maurer. An article in the Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico discusses documentary evidence about the artist, though its author and exact publication date were not confirmed in the sources consulted for this profile. No details of his training, birthplace, or death have been located in the sources available for this profile, and he is understood to be deceased given that his documented activity ends in the early 1780s.

Museum and gallery sources consistently describe Andres de Islas as a leading painter of his period in New Spain, valued for his portraiture of ecclesiastical and viceregal patrons and for his casta paintings. His 1774 series in the Museo de America is treated by specialists as a benchmark for the genre, and his authorship of individual works is periodically confirmed or revised through connoisseurship, as with the pair later reattributed by Alejandro de Antuñano Maurer. In 2022, LACMA's Unframed blog featured a portrait attributed to the artist in an Object Talk post, discussing it as an example of the ambitions of colonial portraiture. No verbatim critical assessments from named critics in major outlets could be confirmed for this profile.

There is no publicly documented, price confirmed auction record for a work by Andres de Islas as of mid-2026. The clearest documented sale event involving his work is a pair of casta paintings consigned to Christie's New York on 16 November 2011 as lots 214 and 215, catalogued at the time as "Mexican School, 18th Century" and acquired by a private collection; the sale price was not publicly disclosed, and the works were only later reattributed to de Islas through scholarly comparison to his Museo de America series. He has no current gallery or estate representation in the way a living artist would; his work circulates through specialist colonial art dealers, such as Robert Simon Fine Art in New York, and occasionally through auction houses, sometimes under a generic "Mexican School" catalogue heading until an attribution is confirmed.

Andres de Islas has no catalogue raisonne, and attributions rest on connoisseurship, dated comparanda, and specialist review rather than a settled documentary record; the reattribution of a pair once catalogued only as "Mexican School, 18th Century" illustrates how attributions in this field can shift. There is essentially no public price history to reference, so any transaction should be benchmarked against the documented Museo de America series and reviewed by a specialist in colonial Mexican painting rather than against comparable auction results, since none are currently confirmed in public sources.