Provenance:

Private Collection, New York.

Literature:

Gustavo Curiel, Carpinteros De La Sierra: El Mobiliario Taraceado De Villa Alta De San Ildefonso, Oaxaca (Siglos XVII Y XVIII), vol. 2, catálogo razonado, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2019, p 404.

This impressive coffer is a quintessential example of the 17th-century marquetry furniture produced in Villa Alta de San Ildefonso during the Spanish Viceregal period. Located in the mountainous region just north of Oaxaca, Villa Alta was known for its trade in a wide variety of local woods and as a renowned production center for furniture. The form of this portable coffer was likely influenced by similar European examples, although the ornamental and technical aspects are distinctively Mexican. Made with countless precise cuts and inlays, the scene on the front includes two figures in European dress pursuing a rabbit, while the domed lid displays dogs and birds on top of the box and a deer with two hares inside. Villa Alta furniture is also known for its vast array of plant life, and here native Mexican and European species are represented, including date palms and a tobacco plant on the reverse. On the sides of the box, parrots are shown sitting in a leafy tree. The decorative border with a sunburst design is found also in a similar Villa Alta box in the collection of the Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City (Fig. 1), which suggests that they were produced in the same workshop.

Decorative objects of this type are not simply valued for their manifest beauty, but also as material representations of the international artistic exchange and trade that occurred on a global scale in the Spanish Viceregal period, as luxury objects of this kind had were prized not only locally but in Europe as well.