 OK, well, we're going to get started. Good evening, everybody, and welcome. My name is Maria Nicanor, and I'm the director here at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. And I'm really, really thrilled to welcome you all here tonight to our Enid and Lester Morse Historic Design lecture series, which as many of you know, examines design and decorative arts from the Renaissance to the present through Cooper Hewitt's expensive collection. The Morse lectures have been a great gift to the Cooper Hewitt over the years. And our only possible thanks to the great, great generosity of our longtime friends and advocates, Denny and Lester Morse. With their support, we invite historians and scholars, educators, and designers to engage with Cooper Hewitt's collection and help grow our understanding of design. Tonight's lecture is not only my first public program since I joined the museum, but it's also symbolically marking the return to public programs. I feel like I need to say this again. Tonight's lecture marks the return of public programs in person here at the museum. So it's a momentous occasion. And I'm so, so happy to celebrate this with you, with Dr. Rivas, with all the audiences that will be able to view the recording of this lecture online in a couple of weeks. And also because it's the 20th lecture in the Morse program lecture series. So a good number for us to celebrate. Over the years, and I say this because I remember coming to the Morse lecture series as a graduate student, the lectures gained a reputation for the presentation of exceptional scholarship and design, an aspect of our programming that remains incredibly important to me, and that I greatly value as the museum that we are, but also the research institution that Cooper Hewitt is. Tonight's lecture will examine the historical context that gave rise to the unique material culture of Spanish America during the colonial age and the context of one of our current exhibitions on view upstairs on our second floor for an exchange 18th century design on the move curated by our own Yao Feng Yu, who's here with us tonight, senior curator and head of product design and decorative arts, and now also acting director for the Asian Pacific American Center in Washington, DC. I'm extremely pleased to have here with us Dr. Rivas Pérez join us to highlight the originality, the ingenuity, and the visual traditions of local artists and to help us understand how they contributed to the development of new cross-cultural world after the profound processes of readjustment and transformation that ensued from the conquest and colonization of the Americas. Dr. Jorge Rivas Pérez is an art historian, an architect, and designer, and is the Frederick and Jan Mayor Curator of Spanish Colonial Art and Department Head at the Denver Art Museum. He previously served as a curator of Spanish Colonial Art at the Coletión Patricia Phelps de Fisneros in Venezuela and as the associate curator of Latin American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He is the Latin American art editor and organizer of the Mayor Center Symposium Program and Publications and has curated exhibitions and contributed essays to publications on a wide range of Latin American art, architecture, design, and material culture topics. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, he received his architecture degree from Universidad Central de Venezuela, a master's degree from the University of Florence in Italy, and his master of philosophy and PhD from the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. We were just introduced, but I thought that an even better biography for him was to be a great discoverer of treasures. And I think in a detective fashion, Dr. Rivas is able to do that. And I think in that fashion, he will open our eyes tonight with a selection of objects that he has ready for us. Some of the works from Cooper Hewitt's collection that Dr. Rivas will open our eyes towards tonight include a comb case with wigs and lice combs from 1671, an 18th century armchair, which is currently on view upstairs at Foreign Exchange, a 19th century panetta, so one of those Spanish combs, an incense burner from 1823, and a 17th century casket as well as objects from other American museums. With that intrigue and testing menu for tonight, please join me in welcoming Dr. Rivas Perez. Thank you for coming. I know that it's challenging. I want to thank Maria Nicanor, director, Jaufen Ju, my dear colleague of design, and Cristina de Leon, and especially Vaso Giannopoulos and Alexa Cummings for this invitation and organizing all the logistics for today. A recent acquisition at the Cooper Hewitt Museum that you see here is a chair from 2019. Really sparked my imagination. I knew this group of designers from Chile probably from 10 years ago. And when I saw this chair, I saw this incredibly object that connects with everything that we deal with in the museum world. And you will see a very random, apparently, collection of things. And then you will understand a little bit why we are here and why we have such extraordinary and complex background. I want to say that everything started in the Caribbean. From the moment of the contact in 1492, the world changed. For both the peoples of the Americas, it was very traumatic and difficult. And for the rest of the world, a Columbia writer that I really admire, Hermar Arciniegas, wrote in his book on the Caribbean the following. Before 1500, men moved in little plots of land, penned in, navigating in lakes. From 1500 onwards, new continents and ocean emerged. It was like the passing from the third to the fourth day of the genesis. All of this drama was lived as much or more than in any other place on the planet in the Caribbean Sea. And everything really happened here in Santo Domingo, which is the first really important city that had been continuously inhabited colonial city since the early 1500s. And I go often to Santo Domingo because my brother and his family, they live there. And I love markets. And in the early 2000s, I went to the Central Market Santo Domingo. And I noticed that everybody there was using very strange metal scoops. And I was intrigued, you know, what are these? But they are not using Chinese plastic scoops for dry goods. And then I saw this man at the entrance of the market selling all these things that he was doing at the market. And I found the scoops. And I realized, wow, this is extraordinary design. And it was one for me, the one that you see there. He transformed an idea that we all know into something new. It's upcycling. He used half of a can, a little piece of wood, nails, cane. And with few elements, he developed this very good and sturdy product. The cane is very light. It's comfortable to touch. The wood and the nails provide strong connection to the different parts. And the most important part is this little metal piece that you see on the top that holds everything together and counteracts torque, which is key in the design world. So this is the way I realized this and has been happening in the Americas from the early 1500s. Europeans brought materials and technology that were unknown in the Americas. They brought glass that was exchanged with the Nazi populations, especially iron that changed completely the game. And some really important technology aspects like straighted blades that we don't think of that. But this is a completely Western invention. In addition to that, the original populations of the Americas were immediately taking those elements and creating objects that were answered to their own cultural world. And this probably, this is one of the most famous one from the early 1500s, is the Museo Regi Pignorini in Rome. And it uses glass mirrors from Venice, glass beads, shell beads. And inside is a rhinoceros horn that makes this connection with Africa. This is a sacred object, a semi, from the Taíno culture. And these kind of objects marks the beginning of the transformation of the cultural world. We need to think that that period was a very traumatic period. Is for the original population of the Americas was the complete end of the world. Not only because invasion, but because of disease in particular. And then you have enslaved Africans, also brought to the Caribbean and the Europeans that were really expanding their control of the land very fast during the 1500s. And then in the late 1500s, there is this extraordinary moment in which two big minds, the most important in Potosí, now Bolivia and the other in Zacatecas, with so much silver that completely changed the economy of the world, completely transformed also the material world. And we start seeing these kind of events. Travelers were surprised that in the Americas, silver was used to create every sort of everyday objects. From things that in Europe were made of pottery or wood, in the Americas were made of silver. You see first a vernegal, otachuela, which is, I will say, like a drinking vessel used for wine or for chocolate later. That is when you have guests in the Spanish world, the 1600s or earlier, you offer this very elegant container for drinking. In the Andes, you have the carol, which is this conical wooden cup that is very different from the retreatals and the elegant retreatals of having guests in your house. But carols are very important because they serve to seal a deal and their exchange. They are usually in pairs. And the shapes has been always more or less the same, this conical cup. For each group, they represented this special moment in which you drink with your guests because of something important. And then we see, later at the end of the colonial period, the third piece that is a very strange object. It is not a carol. It is not a vernegal. More is an object that combines both. And this is what is happening in the material culture of the Americas during this period. Objects that are coming from different cultural backgrounds are completely transformed in the colonial society. And it requires a lot of imagination and creation to do so. This is not a natural process and something that it will be so evident. As I mentioned before, it was common to make objects that in Europe were made of porcelain or clay made of silver. And I love this combination because you have in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt this pot to revest. And at the Denver Museum, we have this beautiful Bolivian perfumador or pot to revest. And you can see they are more or less the same type of object. But the idea of this container is that you have inside these dried flowers or bark of scented woods. And the shape of the object is not that important. So the following century, the 19th century, after the colonial period, you start having these extraordinary objects that have nothing to do with what's the precedent. The beautiful one that you have here, the Cooper Hewitt, which is a little bit of a small architecture, and the deer that we have in Denver from Ayacucho in Peru. And Ayacucho became famous for this kind of perfumador in the shape of very different animals in silver filigree. So as you can see, materials were really key for developing this new type of objects. A key material is tortoise shell. We found that it was very rare in Europe before the trade with the Americas. It was expensive. It was used on very special objects. And starting in the 1500s, we see really exports of tortoise shell to Spain. And we start seeing in Spain furniture using those little planks of tortoise shell. But a little bit in the kind of old-fashioned, like you're using something quite expensive. And so you're using just little pieces. And I put this page of this ship manifesto where you see how they were exporting those. Those escritorios or writing desk become very important. You know, they're fashionable to have those in your house. And then in the America, in Mexico, we have this kind of way more extravagant kind of writing desk contador that it's a piece of furniture that you have in your house that you want to show off. They are very wealthy. And this particular example that we have at the Denver Museum uses a lot of tortoise shell. They are not restricting themselves to those little planks of tortoise shell. And of course, when you have a lot of tortoise shell, you start creating many objects, the kind of objects that you were using in the past made of horn and combs and little boxes, like these two pieces that you have in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt are perfect samples of these kind of industries that you get using the materials that you have available. And they start sporting those because you have so many turtles. And the turtles have these large planks that you start sending combs to Spain, like boxes. And of course, you have the peineta, which is a classic women's head ornament for holding the veil, the mantilla. And the planks of the turtles are way larger than what you can get from a horn. And this is why materialism is so important, because when you have this abundance of tortoise shell and then you realize that you can do larger pieces and more complicated and more elaborated, you are completely transforming a design into something new. And the peinetas are really the ones in the horn are way smaller compared to the ones in tortoise shell. And designers and artists realize the turtles are big, and we can go big. And this is a fantastic sample from Argentina in Buenos Aires. And for some reason, they started creating these enormous peinetas, very complicated. That has nothing to do with the Spanish peineta. They don't resemble to anything seen before. And they are very elegant, and they're very costly, because it will take an entire turtle to create one of those. And of course, there was these big competitions among the ladies in Buenos Aires. Who has the larger one? And it became so ridiculous that they were mocking a little bit this cesare polito-bacle drawing. But that shows that when you have the right conditions, you really create new objects that are meaningful for the societies in which they are created. And somehow, the response from the designers and artists in the Americas to what is happening and to what somehow the colonizers are trying to impose. And this is very important, as we will see. In the Caribbean, we have this very small type of chair called Butake. And it's probably very familiar for any person living in the islands of the Caribbean, the coast of Cuba, Venezuela, and the Gulf of Mexico. Those are very small chairs. This is a very famous painting by Oger, the Puerto Rican painter. And you can see with the white arrow the little Butake, which is a strange type of chair. With this angle in the back, high back, it's very unusual. And the travelers were really surprised when they went to the Americas and I saw this small chair. I'll see the salines, this French traveler that did this very long chronicle of his travels in the Americas wrote that in Venezuela, he saw this chair. And this is the early 1800s. And he was very amazed by the unusual shape of the chair. And he mentioned that I was linked to the pre-Hispanic seats that the Caciques were using. We know, because there are some chronicles and a few examples that in the Caribbean, particularly among the Taíno, there is a type of seat that connects with this tradition. And this is a very rare example of the British museum that still have the gold inlays and decoration. It was a ritual seat. And you will use that seat to inhale tobacco powder and other hallucinogenic substances. So this means that when you get intoxicated, you can rest your back against the back of the seat. But when Europeans came to the Americas, they brought chairs. Chairs are different. There was nothing similar to this chair in the Americas. It is very high. In this case, it was called the Silla de Caderas. So you can fold that chair. It connects with the very old tradition of the Curul seat from the Greeks and the Romans. And Hernán Cortés sent one of those to Montezuma as a gift, which is the lienzo de trascala we see this chair represented. And now we have this very interesting process happening. We have the traditional indigenous chair. We have all this new technology and materials coming from Europe. And we likely have these indigenous artisans that realize, I can do my new version of the duo, which is the Dominican chair. Instead of carved from a single piece of wood, there is a very complicated process. We can use European joinery. But I'm not making this big chair. I'm making a small one like the ones that I want to use. And this is not anymore a chair connected to religion and ritual. The conquest and the destruction of the world also destroyed somehow the symbolic value of those chairs. And this is the moment on which the butaque was born. Very likely in the coast of where is now Venezuela, the word butaque, butaca, comes from the word putaca, which means seat in the language of the Cumana Goto Indians. And you start seeing them in the 1600s inventories using that word. And the trade from the Caribbean that was connecting Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Gulf of Mexico, Campeche, and Veracruz, that was all what you need. And then you see in Campeche, the production is these very sophisticated butaques larger because the clientele is different. It's not anymore the small chair that the Indians use, even if that comes from their artisans. It's now a chair that is the result of the colonial society in which Europe and the Americas blend into something new that it is a new type of chair with no examples in the old world. When 20th century designers, like Clara Portet, were looking for something, a type of chair that was really Mexican, that was really Latin American, this is where she selected a butaque in the 1950s. And she is now so famous because of those butaques. And now the Museum of Modern Art has this example that we're seeing here. But chairs and things evolve over time. In the 1500s in Spain, there was this moment of change in the late 1500s. And a new chair coming from Italy became very popular. This is what we now call the Silla Freilera. And you can see this beautiful Titian painting of the king using one of those very elegant examples. So what happens when you have the influence of a new type that has a completely different structural model to it and then you have the butaque? You have this situation in the 1700s in which there is the Spanish chair, four legs, very straight, straight seat, flat. You have the butaque that was circulating around in the Caribbean. And then you have these new visual repertoires associated to the Rococo style. And then you get to the butaque from the 1700s in which you have this very tall back. It's a seat for resting. It's a seat that you use in your private spaces. You have the seat that has an angle so that pushes you to sit against the back. So a seat that you in a formal situation you would never do. And then you have white arms and a very elaborate decoration. And this is how we see that design keeps evolving and transforming. And you get things from different places into something new. Now you have here at the museum this extraordinary exhibition. And one of the big pieces is this chair that was recently acquired. It is a beautiful chair. And you should go to the second floor. It's the first thing that you see in the exhibition. And I remember the first time I came here to the storage. And the curators were super excited, showing me. We found this fantastic chair. I thought, yes, extraordinary. This is from Mexico, 1700s, the second half of the 1700s. And those chairs are usually called Mexican Chipendale. And yes, you have some kind of feeling of Thomas Chipendale. And as you know, he published in 1754, this book that was highly influential, The Gentleman's and Cabinet Maker's Director. It is used as the Bible of English furniture design to describe the furniture of the Rococo style, which is often inspired in Chipendale design. Chipendale was also very influential in British America, where it's now the United States. So if you see the Mexican chair in the collection and you see Chipendale designs, it is hard to say that they come from the same book. The Mexican example is larger, kind of more solid, way more decorated. There is this abundance of rocaige and foliage all over. And it is different. It feels different. Chipendale was clearly inspiring designers and cabinet makers across Europe and the Americas. And of course, through trade, Spanish Chipendale inspired furniture came to the Americas. We know that because of inventories. Still, this Mexican chair looks very different. We know that those chairs were used in sets. Those chairs were used generally by men. And you will ask, why? How do you know that? Because women will sit in cities like this. And this city, particularly, it looks very strange. It has some kind of the spirit of the Chipendale things. But it's really deep. It's very wide. It's tall back. And the structure is quite robust. And it's kind of a little bit stocky city. And it's this kind of furniture that for years, scholars were saying, this is kind of derivative of Chipendale. It looks like Chipendale, but they never were able to create a piece of furniture like real Chipendale. And I'm not so sure that we're intending. They were. The artisans and designers were intending to create a reproduction of a Chipendale furniture. We know that women in the Spanish war were sitting on estrados. This is a tradition dating from medieval times. They were sitting on this raised platform on top of cushions placed on top of a rock. And that was the feminine space in the Hispanic war. In Spain, that lasted until the early 1700s. The Habsburg were associated with this. So when the bourbon came, it became completely unfashionable to be sitting on the floor on this Islamic fashion. However, in the Americas, they were really very popular until very late. And of course, the fashion of the furniture by the second half of the 1700s, they were following this kind of English-inspired furniture. And we have this very rare print that shows how those sets of furniture were used. If you see on the back, you see the women on this tea. And all those vices were segregated by sex. And the men were in front of them sitting on chairs. This is what I mentioned. They sit on chairs. And you have all these ladies playing. And they are drinking mate. But what is more important is that the ladies are sitting cross-legged on this seti. So a seti needs to be very robust and with a very good structure to be able to permit this kind of position in sitting. And this is absolutely unique of the Americas. You would never see women sitting cross-legged on top of a seti so late in time in the 1700s. But it was so fashionable that even after the independence, we see this. This is Bogota, 1830s or 40s. And you saw these ladies having good time at the estrado, smoking, gossiping, very fashionable. We're completely different fashion this time. And we have records mentioning that still in the mid 1800s that was the fashion. And of course, you need this very sturdy type of furniture to allow that. So what this kind of development tells us is that it is not that really the craftsmen and the artists were trying to imitate a Chipendale style. They wanted to create something that would accommodate to the use of the customs of the time. You need a very sturdy piece of furniture that you can put on top, the thick textiles and the cushions to have the ladies sitting cross-legged comfortable on those setis. They borrow elements from European design for sure. If you study this type of furniture, you will see these elements are clearly inspired of those repertoires, French and British, that you have at that time. But they are doing something different, something that makes sense in these new societies that emerge in the late colonial period. And we're not talking anymore about poor copies of Chipendale design. This is something new. This is something different. This is something that is borrowing ideas that were circulating in prints, in paintings, even in real examples of European furniture that was exported to the Americas. But this is not a poor copy of a European design. And I love this piece that I'm showing right here, because it's a very unusual chair. It is vaguely Chipendale, but it's a very late chair because it was created for the Cathedral of Caracas, for the core of the cathedral in 1797. When Jose Ramón Cardoso designed this chair, which was fashionable was the classical style. Everything was straight with classical ornament. You were recalling the ancient world. And he created these chairs for the cathedral. It was a very important commission. It is clearly connecting with the visual repertoires of 50 years old repertoires. He understood that the arts were moving into this moment of cleanliness. It is really like he removed all these exaggerated carvings. And it has this kind of liquid quality. It's like the chair is melting down. Somehow it precedes the Arnaud Vaux 100 years. He understood that the visual repertoires were changing and simplifying. And he created this very unique version of his own inspiration. And I truly believe that this transformation that we are seeing here is what gave the rise of this kind of design. You will think that I'm a little bit crazy. But I see here this melting quality of the Cardoso chair. This chair is quite interesting because it's made of lava. It's called a remote and chair. So the designers, they're going to specific volcanoes in Chile. They grab all the little pieces of lava and they mix with clay and other components. And then they fire this. And the lava at the right temperature melts down. So it creates this very liquid surface. Somehow recalls the rockage of the Rococo furniture by Chipendall. But also it's a chair that connects with that very unique place, which is Monolita in the Cuitralco, Osorno-Volcano in Chile. So the main is that there is a strong connection with the land and with the people that live there. And this is a process that has been repeating for over 500 years. And contemporary designers are accepting this challenge and creating objects that reflect this idea of that you can take something that exists and transform into something completely new. Thank you so much. I want to come open to questions. Thank you, Jorge. That was, as always, fascinating. I was wondering, has there ever been a connection between the Butaca and the African birthing chairs that have that slanting format? We don't know. There is a chance. In the very specific case of the Butaca, it's so well documented, the pre-Hispanic origin that I've never seen any mention of this African element, but it's perfectly possible because starting in 1509, we have the influence of Africans and slaves, individuals forced to come to the Americas. So there may be a chance. The war Butaca comes from the Cumanagoto, and that's not being clearly identified. And somehow, the evolution of that. But the Americas have always been a melting pot. And I think that African influence can be possible. Yes, there are two more there. Hi, thank you so much for a wonderful lecture. It just reminded me a little bit of the I've spent some time at Falling Water and Frank Lloyd Wright's house and the furniture in it that he did. And some of the designs reminded me of a transition to a couple of American things, like the Ames chair and also the low furniture and some of the slanting. And I don't know if there's any. I've never read any association, but I wondered if that was something that was ever considered. You know, that house is quite interesting. And we know, for example, that the furniture by two Latin American designers are there. The BKF chair, just a very famous butterfly chair that you see everywhere now. And Caffan was the first really supporter of that design, which is from Argentina. And also, there is some furniture by Van Buren and a New York designer that went to Mexico and created Domus, a very famous furniture company. And he had a couple of the Alacran chaise lungs. And they are still there in bad shape, but still there. And probably those were part of the 1939 exhibition. 1940, because the 1939 was a competition. And the exhibition was 1940 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on which Van Buren got one of the prices for Latin America. So furniture moves around more of a that you think. Thank you so much. It was fascinating. I was curious about the two things related to the furniture in terms of the use of mahogany and as well as the actual carving. And wondered, did it take the Europeans coming and raiding the mahogany sources in the Caribbean for the people in Latin America to start using mahogany? And two, did European carvers work with Latin American carvers to create these pieces? Or was it the carving style that, I mean, was the carving already here, the use of carving? Well, you know, the use of mahogany had been documented from pre-Columbian times. Actually, we have at the Denver Museum a very small and rare piece of Mayan carving. And we recently did testing. And it's mahogany. And the duo that we show you was made of lignum vita. You know, it's a very hard wood. It's very sturdy. And chronicles like Galliotto C'è, for example, an Italian that lived in what is now Santo Domingo in the early 1500s. He mentions, in particular, mahogany, that mahogany was used to make furniture and boxes, and it was shipped to Spain. Tropical woods were exported very early on to Spain, particularly El Escorial, you know, the palace. Monastery. A lot of the wood came from the Americas, a variety of woods. So I think that you work with the woods that you have. And the best mahogany is from Hispaniola. And even better than from Cuba, that you have the Hispaniola originally, and they cut all, they chop all the mahogany. And then the Cuban mahogany. And then there is the Central American mahogany. And you see a lot of trade on woods. For example, a lot of Lima was built using red cedar, the Spanish cedar, coming from Nicaragua, because Lima is in a desert area. So it's easier to ship the wood by sea than move that wood from the mountains down to the plains on which Lima is. And in Mexico, there are many examples of this trade or movement of wood. Jorge, we're so lucky to have you here. And as you know, we were lucky to have you here after we acquired the chair. And I was wondering if you could speak more about the upholstery, about the chair that we have upstairs is green. And the silk that's on the set that you showed is red. So maybe you could talk to the audience about your archival research indicating how the chair bind up originally looked. And perhaps sort of part of the kind of how we talked about the armchair versus the side chair and how rare that is. Yes. We have very few visual sources that present furniture. This engraving that I just included in the presentation is one of really very few from the late 1700s. And we have the inventories and the wheels, that kind of list things. In the 1700s, for the furniture, you see a variety of materials, mostly leather. So you have what is called cordovanes, which is these embossed engraved leathers. And I think that those are more from the first half of the 1700s. And then you have badana, which is a very thin leather, which is commonly listed. And then you have silks, the mask. And very late you have tafeitan, which is rare. And for some reason, it's red. It's the color. It is very rare to find other colors on chairs. Sometimes you find velvet as the fabric called velvet. And you have really to wait. In some cases, in the 1730s and 1740s, you see green. For example, the Marchionese of Torretagli, Herestrado was green. The curtains and the rodestrado, the back of Herestrado, which was huge strado and was very costly. But the furniture was all leather on that specific house. And in some cases, particularly in the late 1700s, late 1770s, 1780s, you see other colors, like yellow. That is kind of, but it's very unusual. But that's the moment when you see wallpapers, Chinese wallpapers using on this. And then you have these fresco decorations on the interiors. You see a lot of furniture and a glaze on the English style. And that's the moment of a lot of foreign influences from Northern Europe coming through Latin America. That's the moment that I show on the engraving that you see these pieces. And a lot of that furniture, we think, we used the few scholars that deal with furniture, a lot of that influence came from Spain and from the Canary Island because of the trade with England. Because there are a couple of writing desks in the British style, one of them is in the collection of the Museo Arte de Lima. And the other is in a private collection in Lima that they have labels from a specific cabinetmaker in Cadiz. And we know that those examples have been the hands of those families for several centuries. So the trade was really complicated. And the trade and the fabrics and the materials used for hoesery, we don't know much. But what we know is that the houses were very colorful. And this idea that we have these interiors are kind of more, I will say, lucky is not real. And there are very few examples that have material for the hoesery. We find traces sometimes and remains on the edges of the chair. And a few pieces of church furniture have the stuffing that is usually horse hair. The way the Spanish did in the Spanish-American too, the hoesery is a loose frame that fits into the chair. It is very rarely nailed directly into the wood but you have this frame. And this is one of the reasons because there is not a stretcher on the back of the chair, which is something strange because you see there is this frame and then you see the fabric going on top of the side of the frame, but not holding that. It's just the shape of the chair. And I can't remember exactly, but I think this is the case of the chair that you have here, which is something very unusual. If you see a British cabinetmaker will see this chair, will say, this is very odd. What is happening here that you don't have this piece of wood behind holding the cushion of the chair? And this is something very Spanish in the tradition. And I imagine that my colleague Gustavo Curiel is doing a big research in inventories. And he has been furiously working to publish the book that we are all waiting because we will see a lot on the Mexican chairs of the 1700s about the materials. And I talked to him recently and then he promised that probably next year we'll have that book. Any other question? Thank you. So this is all very new to me. This is all new information. So thank you very much. On your slides, you had under every picture artist unknown. And my curiosity is, were the artisans and artists who created the furniture, the chairs, were they lauded as artists or were they considered laborers? Were they applauded for the artwork that they did or were they considered just laborers or production people? It depends when. In the 1700s, the mid to early 1700s, when the Chippendale came in and the artistry really was so pronounced. There are like two different things there. We as artists are known because over time, sometimes we get the names of those cabinet makers because we know that a specific chair came from a church. And then we find documentation that is letting us know that a specific person can be associated to a chair or a piece of furniture or a retablo or any other piece. And this is why we have some with names and some without names. In most of the cases, because that furniture had been circulating around and we don't have the original place for which the furniture was made, then the names are lost. We hope that perhaps for teachers we will get the name, but that will be hard. And this is why we really, really in the museum world, we want to recognize that they were artists. Well, we know today recognize as an artist a creative person that produced something of his imagination, of her imagination. And this is why you see this. On the other hand, as I was mentioning, we have been very lucky to identify. And I would say it's the last three, four years in the case of Latin America, the names of the makers. Some were very prestigious and famous. I can, for example, mention Domingo Gutierrez in Venezuela. He was very important. He was the most important cabinet maker in the 1700s. And he was commissioned this very important retablo. And then they were arguing that the price was too high. And we know because there was this exchange of correspondents and this litigation with the church, which he called other colleagues to testify that he was an extraordinary cabinet maker. And he won. And he was paid. So that indicates that, particularly in the 1700s, artisans, even in the tradition of the Hispanic world, manual labor was considered a little bit degrading for individuals, just for the low classes. But by the 1700s, you have this. The society really understand that there are good artisans and good artists. And that was important. And probably my dear colleague Ronda is here. From Velazquez onwards, that's the case that you recognize the genius of the creation. And on that note, thank you, Jorge, for the wonderful presentation this evening. And thank you all for joining us. We hope to see you again soon. Thank you so much.