Nativity by Josefa de Obidos

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Josefa de Obidos was born in Seville in 1630. She was the daughter of the Portuguese painter Baltazar Gomes Figueira and the Spanish Catalina de Ayala Camacho, a relative of the painter Bernabé de Ayala. She was sponsored by the painter Francis of Herrera the Elder, in whose workshop his father worked.

When her parents left Seville, she remained with her godfather Herrera the Elder learning in his workshop until she was 14, when she was reunited with her family in Obidos. Shortly afterwards she entered the convent of Santa Ana in Coimbra, where she remained until 1653.​ 

Upon his return home, he expressed his art in paintings, sculptures, tapestries and reliquaries. Both Josefa and her father were influenced by the style of the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran.

This work is inspired by Seghers' painting. Josefa offers her own representation of Saint Francis and Saint Clare contemplating the Child, under the same composition, but at a different angle than that performed by Seghers between 1603 and 1651 (below).

Around 1661, he achieved his emancipation, an unusual legal figure for the time, which allowed him to sign contracts and carry out business and transactions without parental authorization or a guardian. It was then that she stopped making miniatures to make large-format works such as religious altarpieces, since from that moment on she could charge for her pieces herself and buy the painting materials to make them.

The floral decorations and the representation he made in his altarpieces of virgins, saints and Jesus Christ, without features or feelings and with round, rosy faces with large eyes and small mouths, were far from the majority aesthetic trends of his time in Spain.

She invested her earnings in the purchase of farms, fabrics and jewelry, while she took advantage of her visits to convents for professional reasons, to motivate the nuns to seek economic autonomy through crafts and pastry making.

He died in Obidos in 1684, at the age of 54. Bequeathing his inheritance exclusively to the female branch of his family.

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