By Megan Aldridge and Bryan Morey
Sometimes museum objects are a total mystery to museum staff. Back in the early days of museums, record-keeping was often spotty at best. Sometimes there were little to no records to keep.
Take, for instance, the Kentucky Museum’s Snell Collection. One of the earliest donations to the museum, the Snell Collection is comprised of fine art collected by WKU alum C. Perry Snell in the early twentieth century. He donated these pieces to us in 1929 – before we even had a building! Medieval and Renaissance-era paintings along with furniture and sculpture ranging from the medieval period to the late nineteenth century make up the bulk of the collection. Perry collected the works during his travels, and they often had little to no provenance about where they came from – which is a real headache for museum professionals a century later.
Oil painting on wood depicting Saint Mary as the Virgin of Ocotlan
One such piece is this painting of Our Lady of Ocotlan, Tlaxcala. When the museum’s summer 2024 collections intern, Megan Aldridge, sat down to catalog it, the piece was simply inventoried as a painting of a saint. In essence, we had no idea what we had.
Upon pulling the piece from storage the first thing of note was the wreath atop the frame was broken, and the frame itself was chipping. The inscription at the bottom of the painting was in another language, hard to read because of the darkened varnish and the small lettering. The crescent moon at the lady’s feet was a clue as to her status as Mary, the mother of Jesus, but it did not tell which visage of Mary was depicted. The obscured inscription ended up being the key to the mystery. Try and see if you can piece together what it is before you swipe any further:
“Retrato de la Milgrela Inm / gen de Nra Senora de / Ocotlan de Tlax / cala “Portrait of the Miraculous Image of Our Lady of Ocotlán de Tlaxcala”
To uncover the mystery, staff had to figure out what the inscription said, which isn’t easy when working with a very old version of Spanish that is partly written in abbreviations. Almost every word was difficult to decipher. Part of the problem was the faded paint and the crazing on the varnish, but some of the lettering was also obscured by the frame. The toughest words to figure out were “Ocotlán” and “Tlax.” Megan and Bryan Morey, our Collections Manager, stared at the inscription trying to guess it out when Megan started typing in our guesses at “Ocotlán” into Google.
Eureka! The lady depicted in this piece is Our Lady of Ocotlán, Tlaxcala, Mexico, a visage of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Juan Diego Bernardino claimed to have had a Marian apparition in Ocotlán, Tlaxcala, Mexico in 1541, ten years after the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This discovery placed the subject of the painting on an entirely different continent than originally thought. Our current guess is that the painting dates to the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, possibly painted in Spain or Mexico. Sadly, the painter is unknown.
The art storage room at the Kentucky Museum holds several paintings spanning across centuries.
This piece is a testament to the importance of cataloging, preservation, and conservation of museum collections. The painting was donated in 1929, yet it has remained obscure and without interpretation until now. Thanks to the work of collections staff, steps can be taken to research and conserve the oil painting, and hopefully, the other pieces in the Snell Collection.