Once Upon a Time in Mexico

Once Upon a Time in Mexico

Photo by Miguel Flores-Vianna

Liebsohn in his courtyard with an 18th-century portrait by Miguel Cabrera

Photo by Miguel Flores-Vianna

Portable portraiture: an 18th-century oil on copper that Liebsohn turned into a necklace

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When the Mexico City native Daniel Liebsohn was still a teenager, he began acquiring vintage silver pocket watches with a sense of focus some museum curators take years to develop. Now, quips the 38-year-old antiques dealer and collector, “I’m eclectic, maybe too diversified, in my collecting. I’m definitely never static.”

Concentrating mostly on the viceregal period of modern Mexico’s predecessor, New Spain (1535–1821), Liebsohn has acquired a museum-quality collection that fills his bonbon box of a residence in Roma Norte, the city’s latest hip district of galleries, boutiques and restaurants, creating a sumptuous environment similar to that of his nearby gallery-showroom. Tall French doors open onto rooms packed with pieces of sculptural furniture and ornately framed paintings and drawings hung salon-style on almost every square inch of wall.

Liebsohn, who is also an accomplished exhibition organizer, interior designer and museum consultant, identifies three main categories of art and related furnishings from the viceregal era—and he collects them all. “There is religious art, of course, whose purposes were liturgical and educative, to convey the teachings of the Roman Catholic church,” he says. “There was also ‘civil art’: paintings—especially portraits—of people, Mexican scenes and objects in the home that offer a picture of society and everyday life. And there is so-called official art, such as portraits of government figures and furnishings for public buildings.”

In a corner of his high-ceilinged main salon, known as the Garden Room, hangs one of the most important canvases of Mexico’s long colonial past, a double portrait of two young, aristocratic sisters, Juana and María Josefa de Lafore Gay, painted by a now-unknown artist of the 1700s. It is believed that the young Frida Kahlo saw the work in a museum show, and it inspired her iconic double self-portrait, The Two Fridas, which she painted in 1939, at the time of her divorce from Diego Rivera.

Liebsohn first encountered the picture when he was about 15 years old, in an exhibition of Mexican furniture at the Palacio de Iturbide, a venue for cultural events in downtown Mexico City. “Of all my collecting obsessions, this piece represents one of the greatest. I was determined to acquire it, I was patient, and some 15 years later, it was mine,” he says of the canvas, which he obtained from descendants of the Lafore Gay sisters.

“I don’t believe authorship alone, or even primarily, establishes the value of a work,” says Liebsohn. “There are some terrible works by well-known artists and some masterpieces by complete unknowns.” Liebsohn calls attention to four undated and anonymous paintings of hearts, with Christ’s head popping up out of each, illustrating various ways of eradicating sin from one’s soul. He also points out an anonymous portrait of Queen Elizabeth I that is believed to have belonged to her, because it shows her in riding clothes, without her crown. In Liebsohn’s so-called Children’s Room are 18th-century paintings of niños muertos, sometimes called niños dormidos (“dead children,” or “sleeping children”), whose deaths were seen by devout Catholics not as tragic losses but rather as events that prompted “the births of angels.”

What many of the pictures in Liebsohn’s collection share is a “psychological intensity,” he says. As examples, he cites a portrait by the 18th-century Mexican artist Andrés López of a novice Carmelite nun wearing a traditional crown of flowers, and also a 1795 canvas by Juan Sáenz of an aristocratic mother and her daughters dressed up in their finery to go plant flowers. This canvas is noteworthy because, rather unusually, it depicts an urban scene within a domestic portrait: Through a window, it offers a view of what appears to be Mexico City’s Alameda Park.

Although paintings are Liebsohn’s primary interest, he says, “I’m open. It all depends on how something grabs me.” Over the years, a wide array of treasures certainly have grabbed him, including a pair of small painted-wood sculptures of Jesus and Saint John portrayed as chubby infants, from the viceregal era in what is now Guatemala; antique Baccarat jars that were etched with decorative designs in Mexico; and a carved-wood candleholder, taller than the average man, that Liebsohn turned into a lamp base and topped with a dark-red shade, of equally exaggerated proportions, that he designed himself.