The Annunciation

Valdés Leal launched his career in Seville, beginning with an important commission in 1656 depicting the life of St. Jerome for the monastery of San Jeronimo de Buenavista. For a time he was the dominant artist in the city but, by the mid-1660s, he was overshadowed by his almost exact contemporary Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1618-82). . Valdés Leal was a founder of the Academy of Drawing in Seville and served as its president. He is also recorded as an architect, sculptor, engraver and writer. His most important work is in the Church of the Hermandad de la Santa Caridad in Seville.

Valdés Leal's idiosyncratic style is in many respects the antithesis to Murillo's. Unlike Murillo, Valdés Leal favored austere religious subjects that he painted with an intense spirituality. This previously unknown work is a particularly beautiful example and was painted in the last decade of the artist's life, the period that produced such masterpieces as Christ disputing with the Doctors in the Temple (Prado) and The Immaculate Conception (Spanish private collection) (see Valdés Leal, exhibition catalogue, 1991, nos. 80-1). This painting is closest to The Annunciation in the collection of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

We are grateful to Professor Enrique Valdivieso for confirming the attribution of this painting and for suggesting the dating.