Send an ecard of this image

Featured Artist

José Campeche was the most significant Puerto Rican painter of portraits and religious imagery.

Of Afro-Caribbean ancestry, he was the son of a slave who purchased his freedom. Although primarily self-taught, Campeche was influenced by the exiled Spanish court painter Luis Paret y Alcázar, who lived in Puerto Rico from 1775–1778. This painting was commissioned for the cemetery chapel in Caracas, at a time when Venezuela, like Puerto Rico, was ruled by Spain.

In the fourteenth century, John Nepomuk was the confessor to Queen Johanna of Bohemia. Her husband, King Wenceslaus IV, ordered the confessor killed when he refused to break the seal of confession and divulge the queen's secrets. Canonized as a saint in 1729, Nepomuk is invoked as the patron saint of confession, silence, and against slander, often depicted with a finger on his lips or a padlock on his mouth. In this devotional image, six-pointed stars surround the saint's head, each bearing a capital letter forming the word TACUI, Latin for "I did not speak."

Check out more artworks by Campeche in our online exhibition Arte Latino. If you happen to be in Palm Springs, California, then you can see our traveling show in person at the Palm Springs Desert Museum through May 26, 2002.

Source: Jonathan Yorba. Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2001).

Pictured: José Campeche y Jordan, 1751–1809, San Juan Nepomuceno, about 1798, oil, 41 3/4 x 29 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Teodoro Vidal Collection.