Apprentices of the “Art of Painter” in the City of Lima (1779-1803)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that apprentice painters in Lima represented a reduced sector from the last third of the eighteenth century to the first decade of the nineteenth century. Thus, through the collation of primary sources we demonstrate the presence of recognized “Masters of the Art”, such as Julián Jayo, Pedro Díaz, Félix Batlle and José Mendoza, whose recognized trajectory has been highlighted on more than one occasion by the historiography of viceregal art, but until the present study their workshop disciples had not been documented. These apprentices, mostly from the Casa de Niños Expósitos de Nuestra Señora de Atocha, reflect the vicissitudes of labor insertion in the painters’ workshops and, in addition, it allows us to systematize these artists, their social relations and teaching mechanisms. After having presented and analyzed this historical panorama, we offer six paleographic transcriptions of apprentice annotations, where we are presented with the contract that regulated the relationship between the young apprentice and his master, whose clauses had to be fulfilled in a certain number of years, being able to exercise at the end of that period of time the expressed “Painter’s Art”.