Portrait of Francisco De Paula Sanz: Race, Art Production, and Power in Late-Colonial Spanish America

Portrait of Francisco de Paula Sanz features three subjects: the eponymous Spanish-born career colonial official who poses at its center; the black male servant or slave standing to his left, and the dog perched at his right foot. The unsigned, undated canvas currently hangs in Argentina’s Museo Histórico Nacional (National Historical Museum), in Buenos Aires, where Sanz first served as director of the Royal Tobacco Monopoly from 1777-1783 and then as governor from 1783-1788. It is tempting to tie the work’s origins to this decade-plus span, but I argue that it actually dates to Sanz’s subsequent 1789-1810 governorship of Potosí, Upper Peru. More than a point of information, this claim has profound implications. In Potosí, Sanz was tasked by the Spanish Crown to breathe new life into the faltering mining industry by increasing labor demands on indigenous workers. His efforts proved unpopular, unsuccessful, and ultimately led to his demise. Emerging from this context, then, the portrait both tells a complicated story in which Sanz stood at the center of a conflict between Crown ambition and American reality, and embodies two distinct but deeply intertwined institutions of eighteenth-century Spanish colonial society: the indigenous artistic guilds and workshops that supported the work and interests of native artists, and the Spanish Crown that relied on images produced by those artists to communicate its local officials’ authority over indigenous and black subjects, dominion over the region’s geography, and loyalty to imperial interests.