When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
Free worldwide shipping, and I prepay the duties. You pay the listed price and nothing else. No customs bill at your door, no broker fee, no surprise at delivery. Tariff code 9701.91 — original hand-painted artwork under 100 years old.
A hand-painted ex-voto retablo on tin, dated August 7, 1951, with the petitioner's own photograph set into the panel. This is the rarest configuration in the form. The upper left holds an original black-and-white studio portrait of a young woman, laid directly into the tin and framed by a hand-painted cartouche of blue-grey leaf-and-vine scrollwork against an oxblood ground. She looks straight out at you. On the right stands San Miguel Arcángel in a blue tunic and red tonelete over green breeches, a processional cross in one hand and the scales of justice in the other, wings spread, his helmet crowned with roses. Beneath his feet a horned red devil writhes in a great globe of orange flame, and below that three souls rise from cloud in ochre robes. The lower left carries her account in oxblood lettering on a tan field. What makes this panel unusual is not the iconography but the collision of two kinds of image: a photograph, which claims the woman existed, set beside a painted archangel, which claims he intervened. The panel asserts both with equal confidence. These retablos come to me through a single path: an anonymous painter working in a rural district of Jalisco, who never signed his work and has long since died; the devotee who commissioned the panel; that family's local church, where it hung as an offering; a custodian who kept the accumulated ex-votos there for many years; and from him, my dealer. I know every step of that path and I have no doubt the piece is what it is, but the individual links are undocumented and I won't dress them up as a chain of title. Any dealer who hands you a fully documented provenance for an ex-voto invented it.
Condition. The painted surface is strong and the full inscription is legible. The photograph has darkened and abraded along its upper right, with a loss through the hair area and light foxing at the edges, but the face itself is clear and undamaged. A torn nail hole sits at top center with lifted tin and paint loss around it. Scattered flaking runs along the panel edges, and there is a small chip at the upper left of the cartouche. The verso is bare tin under heavy oxidation, with a broad rust field, deep pitting and the original oxblood paint wrapping the hand-snipped edges. No restoration, no overpaint, no cleaning. Sold as found.
The inscription. As painted, with the original spelling preserved: lupema urozco Rosas: me salieron llagas en Todo el cuerpo. Tenia mucho Dolor No Tenia Dinero Para ir al Ductor. Pedi a San Miguel arcanjel. i sane... milagro concevido Agosto 7 De 1951: Con gratitud...
Corrected Spanish: Lupe Ma. Orozco Rosas: me salieron llagas en todo el cuerpo. Tenía mucho dolor. No tenía dinero para ir al doctor. Pedí a San Miguel Arcángel y sané. Milagro conceoffero, 7 de agosto de 1951. Con gratitud.
English: Lupe Ma. Orozco Rosas: sores broke out all over my body. I was in great pain. I had no money to go to the doctor. I asked Saint Michael the Archangel, and I was healed. Miracle granted, August 7, 1951. With gratitude.
A note on the spelling. The irregularities are the painter's, not errors in transcription, and they are part of what makes the panel real. Accents are absent throughout — Tenia, Pedi, sane, gratitud. The letter i stands in for y. Doctor is written Ductor and Orozco is written urozco, the o closed into a u, which is a habit of this hand and appears across his other panels. Arcángel loses its accent and takes a j for the g, as arcanjel. Conceoffero is written concevido, with a v for the b. Capitals fall wherever the painter felt emphasis — Todo, Dolor, No Tenia Dinero, Para, Ductor, De — while the petitioner's own given name and surname are set in lowercase. That given name is painted as one word, lupema, which almost certainly compresses Lupe Ma. — Guadalupe María — a common Jalisco form.
Measurements. 11 inches wide by 11 inches tall (27.9 by 27.9 cm). Square tin panel, unframed.
A note on the photographs. Every image is of the exact panel you will receive, shot in natural daylight with no filters and no color correction. Both the painted face and the bare tin verso are shown, along with close details of the mounted portrait, the archangel, the flames and the inscription. Some photographs place the panel in a room setting so you can judge scale and see how it reads on a wall or a shelf. Those backgrounds are for context only. Nothing in them is included in the sale.
Grade and value. Graded A. This is the strongest configuration I handle. The mounted photograph puts it in a different class from a painted-only panel — most ex-votos give you a story about a person, and this one gives you the person. Attribution is complete: a petitioner named in full, an exact calendar date, and a poverty detail she chose to record, that she had no money for a doctor. The iconography is ambitious for this painter, with the archangel, the devil, the flames and the three souls all worked into one half of an eleven-inch square. The square format is uncommon in the form and hangs well. Condition is honest rather than fine, with the loss at the top of the photograph and the torn nail hole, and that is what keeps this from being priced higher still. The A band opens at $280, and those are realized sales, not asking prices. Gallery replacement value through a Santa Fe, San Miguel de Allende or Mexico City dealer is approximately $950, which is a separate question from the grade band and is the figure for insurance or estate purposes.
Item specifics. Hand-painted ex-voto retablo, oil on tin, with mounted original photograph. Devotion: San Miguel Arcángel. Painted August 7, 1951. Petitioner: Lupe Ma. Orozco Rosas. Place: Jalisco, Mexico. Miracle: healed of sores over the whole body when she could not afford a doctor. Size: 11 by 11 inches. Unsigned by the painter. Unframed. Condition: used, original untouched surface. Tariff code 9701.91.
Shipping and duties. Free worldwide shipping by DHL Express with tracking, and I prepay all import duties and VAT. You will not be asked for anything at delivery. The panel is packed flat and corner-protected by Diseños de Cartón in Colonia Americana, Guadalajara, who build a rigid custom box for every piece. Open the box along the seams rather than cutting into it. If you need the piece delivered to an address different from the one on your account, message me first, as freight to a different destination may cost more and the difference would be yours to cover.
Questions. Ask me anything about the inscription, the condition, the devotion or the region. You will never get an automated or AI-written reply from this shop. Every message is answered by me personally, and usually within a few hours.
Thank you for looking.
God bless,
Ricardo Ivan Cardenas EMBA, St. Joseph's University New York Business School Graduate
