The Segesser Hide Paintings: Masterpieces Depicting Spanish Colonial New Mexico (SOLD)

The magnificent Segesser hide paintings in the collections of the Museum of New Mexico's Palace of the Governors are without question among the most historically significant and artistically absorbing artifacts of the Spanish Colonial period in New Mexico.

Shortly after WW II the hides were discovered in an estate in Lucerne by Swiss scholar Gottfried Hotz, who would devote twenty-five years of his life to understanding their origin, narrative depictions and ultimate significance. The hides, Hotz learned, had been commissioned by an eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary to Sonora, Mexico, and sent to his family estate, where they remained for more than 250 years. Their unveiling before an American audience, in 1986, brought to public view the finest and best-preserved examples of documentary skin painting the world had known:

The Segesser hides depict the competition between Spanish and French armies for control of the trans-Missouri West and battles between Spanish and Pueblo soldiers fighting French and Plains Indian forces. Scholars agree that the artists were most surely eye witnesses to the events portrayed.