[MEXICAN GAME]. Los Charros Contrabandistas ("Charro Smugglers")

Mexico City: Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, 1913. Very good. Broadside (403 x 303 mm) printed on thin rose paper. Preserved in mylar L-sleeve backed with lig-free board. IN UNCOMMONLY GOOD CONDITION. NEAR-FINE POSADA GAME PRINTS SELDOM APPEAR ON THE MARKET AS THE PAPER WAS (AND IS) INCREDIBLY THIN, AND THE GAMES WERE HEAVILY USED AND REUSED TO PIECES BY GAMERS OF ALL AGES.

The present print is Posada's VARIATION on the "Juego de la oca" (Game of the Goose), here featuring Mexican smugglers on horseback (hence the game's name: "Los Charros Contrabandistas"); these cowboy crooks lasso all 64 circular spaces, and the players most move past some of Posada's most enduring icons: beginning at the Scorpion at the top left, the player must move past the skull-and-crossbones smuggler at the bottom right; along the way Posado introduces different characters, good, bad, and ugly. Be careful not to land on the final space, "la Calavera" because if you do: you lose.

José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) was quite simply the most important Mexican graphic artist of all time. He showed talent for printmaking from a very young age, joining the print studio of José Trinidad Pedroza in 1870, and there learning engraving and lithography. His first of many thousands of virulent political cartoons appeared in a publication called "El Jicote" (The Wasp). With his mentor he moved to León (Guanajuato) and established a printing business, but tragedy struck which León was completely flooded in 1888 and they lost everything. Posada moved to Mexico City, and there he would remain for the rest of his days. For more than twenty years he produced broadsides and penny cartoons for the publisher Antonio Vanegas Arroyo (as here); his illustrations for newspapers and periodicals are absolutely legion. While in the 1880s his work was heralded as the preeminent graphic art of Mexico, at the time of his death he had fallen into obscurity and was buried in a pauper's grave. Nonetheless, his "calaveras" (skulls and skeleton caricatures) are without equal and it is with good reason that he has been described as the Mexican Goya and Mexican Daumier. (See the Clark Art Institute exhibition of "José Guadalupe Posada: Symbols, Skeletons, and Satire, 7/66/22 - 10/10/22).

IN VERY GOOD CONDITION, WITHOUT ANY WORMING, TEARS, OR REPAIRS.

Tyler, Posada's Mexico, 75.