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.

His gallery features an even wider array of objects, including a pair of life-size 19th-century terra-cotta bulldogs from Britain; leather-bound volumes of Je sais tout, a French magazine from the 1920s; a Louis XV daybed-divan big enough to hold a football team; and a pair of Christian Dior high heels from the mid-1900s covered with sequins and embroidery. The daybed and the shoes once belonged to María Félix, the much-loved actress-diva of the golden age of Mexican cinema, who died in 2002. Toward the end of her life, Liebsohn knew her well.

The beginnings of Liebsohn’s eclectic inventory can be traced to his first obsession: pocket watches. He recalls how he patiently saved up his allowance and birthday-gift money to amass the collection, which included examples crafted in Europe, Mexico and the U.S. in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Some had finely wrought decorative motifs. Others gently chimed the hours. At 18, Liebsohn, whose Argentinian mother had studied art in Buenos Aires and was a nonprofessional painter, and whose Mexican father ran a textiles business, sold his watch collection and used the earnings to open his first antiques store, in the Plaza del Ángel, a building in the Mexican capital’s Zona Rosa district that housed antiquarians’ shops. He sold “furniture, paintings and decorative-art items, although not too many, as the space was small,” he says. “Its second floor was dedicated to antique clothing and textiles, some of my passions.”

When Liebsohn opened his first shop—in time, he would have four in the same place—he did so with a flourish: He presented a fashion show that looked back at a century of Mexican clothing and costume, all taken from another of the well-researched collections he had assembled before he had turned 20. Those holdings were soon acquired by Mexico City’s Soumaya Museum, founded by the world’s second-richest person, Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helú.  

At the time, Liebsohn was an undergraduate in communications at the Universidad Nuevo Mundo, on the outskirts of Mexico City, but he gave up his studies to devote himself full-time to collecting and dealing. As he saw it then—and still regards it today—selling his finds is less a means for striking it rich than a way to raise funds with which to seek out additional unusual, undervalued objects.

Liebsohn does not divulge where he finds his material, but, he says, “anything of any value almost always passes through the hands of dealers in Mexico City.” That does not stop him, however, from sometimes venturing out to provincial towns to poke around and see what he might find. A good example of such a discovery is a mural-size oil-on-canvas tableau, dated 1725, by the painter Joseph Miranda, which came from a former Jesuit hacienda in the state of Puebla, south of Mexico City. On display in a red-walled room in Liebsohn’s gallery-showroom, the picture, which he acquired in the former hacienda’s estate sale, is packed with images of sacred figures and the Holy Trinity. (The irony that a Jew who grew up without a typical Mexican Catholic’s religious education should know as much as he does about the iconography of the art and artifacts of the Mother Church is not lost on him.)

Last year, Liebsohn consolidated three of the four retail spaces he had operated in the Plaza del Ángel (keeping only his textiles store, Las Tijeras, or “The Scissors”) into an impressive two-floor gallery-showroom in a historic house in the flourishing Roma Norte district, near his own home. Items for sale range from a Cézannesque self-portrait by the Mexican modernist Ángel Zárraga (1886–1946) to a compact, timelessly chic sofa designed by the Mexican modernist architect Mario Pani (1911–1993), to a pair of Italian-made wood-framed upholstered chairs from the early 1800s, adorned with outrageous, oversized carvings of cute, cavorting squirrels; the chairs also once belonged to María Félix. After two decades of collecting and dealing, Liebsohn thinks the market has finally caught up with him. “Mexico is gearing up to mark the 200th anniversary of the start, in 1810, of the Mexican War of Independence from Spain,” he says,  “so now collectors are seeking material from that period.”

He’s interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone. Setting down a little glass of tequila that he has been slowly sipping, he apologizes for taking the call. After a few seconds of florid pleasantries, he looks up and excuses himself again. “I’ll just be a moment,” he says graciously—and with notable excitement. “It’s about a painting.” 

"Once Upon a Time in Mexico" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.