“Our Lady of Light” Finds a Permanent Home in Santa Fe

Many Loretto Community members may remember the painting “Our Lady of Light” that hung in the convent in Santa Fe, N.M., and then at St. Mary’s Academy and the Loretto Center in Denver. This beloved work has made many moves in the past decades, but it has now been established in a permanent home: the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts in Santa Fe.

What path brought this painting to Loretto and then to the collections of an excellent museum? The story of this work begins in present-day Mexico around 1750, when the artist Miguel Cabrera painted this life-size image of “Our Lady of Light.” Cabrera was regarded during his lifetime as the greatest painter in New Spain. He is still known in the art world for his religious paintings as well as his series of casta paintings of mixed-race families. (Cabrera himself was mestizo.)

The early history of “Our Lady of Light” is scant, but research has shown that it came to New Mexico to be placed in La Castrense military chapel — also called Our Lady of Light — in Santa Fe. This chapel was constructed in the mid-1700s to serve the military colonizers. The chapel fell into disrepair by the mid-1800s, and Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy had it demolished in 1859. The painting was removed from the carved stone reredos altarpiece (itself a work of art) of the chapel and retained by the archbishop. In the late 1970s, Abp. Lamy gave “Our Lady of Light” to Loretto’s Mother Magdalen Hayden for Loretto’s Our Lady of Light Academy in Santa Fe.

“Our Lady of Light” hung in the Santa Fe convent until the academy closed in 1968. Loretto then transferred the painting to Colorado. Some sisters remember it hanging in St. Mary’s Academy in Denver; eventually it was moved to the Loretto Center. It made a trip to the Rocky Mountain Regional Conservation Center in the early 1990s to be cleaned and repaired before briefly returning to Santa Fe in fall 1994. There it was displayed in the Palace of the Governors as part of the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Mother Magdalen’s death.

The painting again departed the Denver Center in 2014 to be displayed in the New Mexico History Museum’s exhibit “Painting the Divine: Images of Mary in the New World.” It remained on loan to the museum, then passed to the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts on Museum Hill in Santa Fe in May 2018. It has been on display on an annually renewed loan ever since.

For the past several years, the Loretto Executive Committee and the Loretto Heritage Center have been concerned with finding an appropriate permanent home for “Our Lady of Light.” We all firmly believed that the painting should stay in the American Southwest. The Motherhouse does not have adequate facilities to house this large work, and the change in climate conditions could harm the painting. Most importantly, the history of “Our Lady of Light” lies in the Southwest. From its original use in the military chapel to its longstanding presence in Our Lady of Light convent and then the Denver Loretto Center, it has been a fixture among the religious art of New Mexico and Colorado.

With that in mind, the Executive Committee decided to donate “Our Lady of Light” to the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts in February 2022, with the condition that the painting remain in the public trust in perpetuity. This donation not only places the painting in a permanent home where it will be cherished and preserved, it also continues Loretto’s legacy of education by keeping this important painting publicly accessible to visitors and researchers.

Fall 2022 marks both the 170th anniversary of Loretto’s first journey to Santa Fe and the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts — what a fortuitous time for a celebration of this major donation! Keep an ear out for coming announcements of how the Loretto Community and the museum will be celebrating together in Santa Fe.