Nicolas Enriquez

Nicolas Enriquez, sometimes recorded in full as Nicolas Enriquez de Vargas, was born in 1704 in New Spain, present-day Mexico. He trained under the painter Juan Rodriguez Juarez in the workshop tradition of the period, and no formal school, degree, or specific years of study are documented beyond this apprenticeship. He helped found the Academia de Pintores in New Spain in 1728, an early professional academy that preceded the Real Academia de San Carlos.

Enriquez built a reputation for highly finished oil paintings on copper, a support he used extensively across his career for devotional and Marian subjects. A signed suite of five copper paintings, inscribed as made in Mexico in the year 1773, later entered the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, including a Virgin of Guadalupe with the Four Apparitions now on view in the American Wing. He is understood to have died around 1790 in New Spain; the exact date and place of his death are not documented in the sources available.

Formal critical commentary on Nicolas Enriquez is limited, since he worked well before the era of newspaper or magazine art criticism as it is known today. The most substantive published assessment comes from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which describes him as "a distinguished yet understudied eighteenth century New Spanish (Mexican) painter" and credits him with a strong reputation for his highly finished oil paintings on copper. No exact quotations from named critics writing in major contemporary outlets have been located.

Nicolas Enriquez's market is that of an Old Master era colonial painter rather than a modern or contemporary artist. Artprice records roughly 49 public auction appearances for the artist, with MutualArt recording around 34 works at auction; both databases cite a maximum realized price of USD 552,500, though the specific work, auction house, and sale date behind that figure are not disclosed in the publicly accessible portions of either database. No verified, fully itemized auction record for this artist could be confirmed as of this writing, so collectors should treat any single reported price with caution.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Nicolas Enriquez, and attribution depends on signed and dated works, provenance, and the scholarship of institutions such as LACMA and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His auction market is thin and only partially documented in public sources: market databases point to a reported high near USD 552,500, but the underlying work, auction house, and date are unconfirmed, so any single result should be read with caution rather than as evidence of a broad market trend. Collectors interested in colonial Latin American painting should weigh museum placement and documented, signed examples most heavily when assessing a given work.