Attributed to Mateo Gilarte (Orihuela, c. 1629 - Murcia, 1675)

Attributed to Mateo Gilarte (Orihuela, c. 1629 - Murcia, 1675)
"Immaculate Conception"
Oil on canvas. Canvas measurements: 156 x 120 cm. With a carved and gilded period wooden frame. Frame measurements: 180 x 143 cm. The back has been patched.
Mateo Gilarte was a Spanish painter who was trained in the Valencian workshops of Pedro de Orrente (Murcia, 1580 – Valencia, 1645) and Jerónimo Jacinto Espinosa (Burgos, c. 1610 – Madrid, c. 1655), who influenced him especially in his first paintings such as the “Annunciation to the shepherds”, kept in the Braunschweig Kunstmuseum, and the pair of “The Good Shepherd” and “The Virgin Mary” (c. 1660), currently in the Museo de Bellas Artes in Murcia, the city where he lived from 1658 until his death.
Highlights of his artistic output include the two only documented pictorial sets which were commissioned. The first, from 1651, is a series of thirteen canvases of the life of the Virgin Mary commissioned by the Congregation of Knights of the Assumption and located in the Church of Saint Stephen in Murcia (now the seat of the regional government); nine of the canvases belong to the Prado Museum and are kept in different institutions, and the whereabouts of four of them are unknown. The second is a set of six canvases and the frescoes at the chapel of the Confraternity of the Rosary in the Church of Saint Dominic in Murcia, one of which is “The Battle of Lepanto”, in which Juan de Toledo (Lorca, Murcia, c. 1611/1618 - ?, 1665) painted only the war action and our painter, as well as the four medallions of Philip II, Ali Pasha, John of Austria and Pius V in the margins, painted the depiction of the Virgin of the Rosary in a floral border in the upper central part. This Virgin has a certain similarity to our painting, as well as the same depiction of the Virgin, this time by the Gilarte brothers and workshop, which can be found in the Murcia parish of San Bartolomé.