Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 97. (Budapest, 2002)
The Year 2002
his list of works under the name of José Antolínez. 8 Soria, too, mistakenly included in his study on José Antolínez the two works in Budapest from the Esterházy gallery, certainly by Francisco Antolínez. 9 It was Simon Meiler in 1907 who first corrected the attribution to José Antolínez and rightly ascribed the Holy Family —which came into the possession of the Esterházy collection from the Bourke Collection —to Francisco Antolínez Sarabia. 10 The biography of "Don Francisco Ochoa y Antolínez" is known to us from the Vidas of Palomino. 11 The painter was held to be a follower of Murillo in Sevilla and described himself, referring to his legal education, as „soy letrado y no pintor" (I am a lawyer, not a painter). He lived in Madrid at the end of his life and died there in 1700. According to Valdivieso, he usually did not sign his paintings, and though he worked frequently for the art market, only two signed works are known by him: an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Shepherds in the Cathedral of Sevilla, which he made in 1678, and a work depicting the Nativity of the Virgin that recently surfaced on the art market in Madrid and is signed as "D. Francisco Antolínez Ochoa faciei 1691". 12 The artist usually painted series of works that consisted of six, eight or twelve paintings depicting the stories of Abraham, Jacob and David from the Old Testament, and the lives of Jesus and Mary from the New Testament. The series contained works of horizontal format and of small or medium size, and were for the most part dispersed later. Both works of the master in Budapest display the characteristic features of his painting. In the foreground of the loosely painted landscapes, the most important part of the work, he placed small figures that are often repeated in a close-up view in his pictures. The characteristic figurai types follow those of Murillo. Antolínez y Ochoa set the scene of the Holy Family in the Carpenter s Workshop (fig. 61)—which Murillo showed in an interior —in a landscape with deep perspective. The figures of the sewing Mary and St. Joseph, shown in foreshortening with bowed head, are related to those in other autograph works of the artist such as the Jacob (Museo de Arte Ponce, Puerto Rico). A work close to ours also in size is the Rest on the Flight into Egypt (41.5 by 61.5 cm); it is not impossible that the two works originally formed part of the same series. 13 The position of the hand of the sewing Mary in Budapest, as well as the building with the coupled windows in the back, returns s Mündler, O., Schätzungliste über die Bestände der Esterházy-Galerie, 1869, XIV, 4., published in Az Országos Magyar Szépművészeti Múzeum állagai I., Budapest 1909. 9 Soria, M. S., "José Antolínez. Retratos e otras obras", Archivo Espahol de Arte 29 (1956) 5. 10 Melier, S., Régi spanyol festők a Szépművészeti Múzeumban, Művészet 59 (1907); Gaya Nuno, J. A., La pintura espahola fuera de Espaha, Madrid 1958, 104 (Francisco Antolínez?). 11 Palomino, A., in Vidas (ed. Mallory, N. A.), Madrid 1986, 339-40. 12 Valdivieso, E., História de la pintura sevillana, Sevilla 2002, 236-37; id. in Caylus, Madrid 1997-98, 104. 13 Sold Sotheby's, New York, 18 April, 2000, lot 278. The work in Budapest is also close to the Jacob and Rachel at the Well (Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas).
