Francisco Clapera

From chino (the male offspring of a barcino and a mulata) and an indigenous woman: a 'genizara'. Denver Museum of Art.

Francisco Clapera (1746–1810) was a Spanish painter who after training in Spain lived and worked in New Spain. Here he created casta paintings, a distinctive Mexican genre that depicts in sets of consecutive images scenes of racial mixing among the Indians, Spaniards and Africans who lived in the Spanish colony. After his arriving in Peru, Clapera traveled to Mexico. There, he met Jeronimo Antonio Gil, the first director of the Royal Academy of San Carlos. Gil, wanting Clapera to become part of his Academy, convinced him to stay in Mexico. Ilona Katzew, art historian and author of Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, noted that Clapera was one of the few artists who painted a series of castas.