The Nun Jerónima de la Fuente

In June 1620 a Franciscan nun from Toledo was in Seville waiting for a ship. Jeronima de la Fuente was 66 and had been sent to the Philippines to found a convent, Santa Clara de la Concepcion in Manila, where she became the first abbess and where she died ten years later. The sisters she was leaving wanted something to keep of her, and the portrait was painted in those weeks before she sailed. She stands, holding a prayer book in one hand, and grips a crucifix in the other so firmly that people have long described it as a weapon. The light is hard and takes nothing away from the face or the hands. The crucifix itself was probably a bronze copy of the one owned by Velazquez's teacher Pacheco, a model brought from Rome to Seville by a silversmith and reproduced all over the city. At least two more versions of this portrait exist, which is what you would expect when a convent wants a likeness of an absent mother. The long biographical lettering was added later. For three centuries the picture hung in the Toledo convent under the name of another painter, Luis Tristan, until it was shown at a Franciscan exhibition in 1926 and cleaning brought up the signature and the date.