Attributed to Juan Patricio Morlete (San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, 1713 - Mexico City, 1772). Casta painting. Black and Spanish produces mulatto'. Oil on copper. 52 x 48 cm. Morlete was one of the Novo-Hispanic painters who most often painted landscapes and, in fact, there are other examples by him of caste pictures painted in the open air. This characteristic, together with the great pictorial quality of the three figures depicted, and the model of the pedlar located near the family, (which is repeated in other of his artworks) and that Morlete is the only painter who mentions the word 'produce' in his titles instead of other terms to define mestizos (as we find in other paintings of his, for example in the painting entitled 'Valle de Iztacalco, de yndia y español produce mestiza' (Indians from the Valley of Iztacalco, and Spanish produce mestiza), which is in the Kaluz Museum) allows us to attribute this marvellous caste painting to the artist. This painting is a real rarity as it depicts the caste family scene in an outdoor landscape. Usually, these caste paintings were depicted in domestic settings, interiors of houses... and almost always with very repetitive models. In this case, we are presented with the Mexican Alameda Park, recognisable by its fountain, next to the Paseo Bucarelli. In the foreground are the protagonists, and around them, pedlars, couples strolling, a man on horseback, noblemen riding in a carriage, etc. In the lower margin we find the usual cartouche on which the painter originally entitled the work with the inscription 'Negro y española produce mulata' ('Black and Spanish produces mulatto'), which one of its owners, who probably treasured it, covered with white paint and renamed it 'Paseo de Bucarelli', presumably in an attempt to conceal the obvious message of the work. The theme of caste painting was developed in 18th-century New Spain and was intended to show and classify the diversity that arose from the mixing of ethnicities. This was a complex task, as the Prado Museum reports in the catalogue published for the exhibition 'Tornaviaje. Ibero-American Art in Spain', as "natives of the West Indies, Spaniards and Europeans, African slaves and a small amount of Asian emigrants ... made up a stratified society, but with threads of communication between them", a diverse society that gave rise to caste painting. Even so, the value of this pictorial genre does not lie exclusively in 'the classificatory tendency of the 18th century' or even to 'European concepts of the exotic', but studies such as Ilona Katzew's reveal the value of this genre for 'the construction of its own differentiated image' of New Spanish society. In fact, Katzew continues, caste painting 'is a unique pictorial genre that has no equivalent in European art', indeed, 'it is fundamentally limited to the viceroyalty of New Spain', although mixing of ethnicities took place in all the Spanish colonies. In this sense, the Director and Curator of Latin American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, concludes in her study that 'caste painting is not a monolithic genre, but one that encloses multiple simultaneous meanings' and that, furthermore, 'it offers a clear example of how New Spain could be a generative centre and not just an area that remained on the periphery of artistic events', as it has traditionally been considered. Reference bibliography: - Katzew, Ilona (2004). Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. Yale University Press. - Katzew, Ilona (2004). 'Caste Painting: Racial Representations in Eighteenth-Century Mexico'. Turner Publicaciones S.L. - López Guzmán, Rafael (Ed.) (2021). 'Tornaviaje. Ibero-American art in Spain'. Museo Nacional del Prado (pp. 165-181).