Portrait of Nicolás Matías Fernández Méndez

José Campeche, an artist of African descent, was the leading painter in Puerto Rico at the end of the eighteenth century. His work was varied, but he was an especially prolific painter of portraits, created to satisfy the needs of a colonial society that required likenesses of distant monarchs as well as local officials, military leaders, clerics, merchants, and their families. The present work is an exceptionally well-preserved example of Campeche’s private portraiture, painted on the almost miniature scale that is typical of such works. The sitter, Nicolás Matías Fernández Méndez, was a municipal official and a prominent merchant whose trade network stretched across the Atlantic to his native Tenerife and crisscrossed the Caribbean basin to Caracas and Campeche. Pictured as a mature man, wearing a scarlet uniform jacket, Fernández turns his forthright gaze on the viewer. He is positioned against a plain background, behind a frame of fictive masonry that strengthens the impression of his presence.