When you think about naked bodies, an idea of eroticism quickly comes to mind, but this is not always the case. Many nudes and semi-nudes in art are far from that purpose, as is the case with the enormous painting Liberty Leading the People, by Eugène Delacroix, where the woman who allegorizes that human condition shows her breasts in the air, far from manifesting a sensual condition.
Although the nude was a constant theme of Western art for centuries, it could not be represented without justification. It was essential that the character come from a biblical, mythological, Greco-Roman history theme or personify an allegory. It had to be Adam and Eve, Bathsheba, Venus, Diana, Phryne, Lucretia or some alma mater (nurturing mother) like Delacroix's Liberty. At some point the representation of people belonging to what for Europe were exotic peoples was added, that is, the natives of the American, African and Pacific Ocean territories.
When modernity advanced, nudes included anonymous women from the town (although it was a well-known noblewoman, such as in Goya's The Naked Maja, who was actually the Duchess of Alba) as well as odalisques and women from Muslim harems. Both were useful resources in the 19th century until all pretext disappeared with Breakfast on the Grass, by Edouard Manet, where the nudity of the woman accompanying the dressed young people has no obvious reason.
Under this circumstance of openness, the main Yucatecan painter of the 19th century worked, Juan Gamboa Guzmán, who during his stay in Paris made several sketches of nudes in graphite pencil, especially male ones, which have survived to this day and are found in private collections. . These works were part of the preparation of every painter who pursued formal studies.
An oil nude is also preserved, where the young woman is seen from her hips up, in a sensual twist of her body that does not allow her face to be seen in its entirety. A photograph of that painting appeared as an illustration in an article by Eduardo Urzaiz in a magazine from 1917 and the oil painting was exhibited to the public in 2011, provided by its current owner. That article by Urzaiz also includes another painting where a woman also appears from the waist up but covering her breasts. The whereabouts of this work, like others by Gamboa Guzmán, is unknown.
Although in Yucatan they taught how to paint a nude model and nude works were painted, drawn and sculpted, decades had to pass for this subject to be freely exhibited in cultural venues, without prohibitions or scandals. Luckily, we have had and continue to have Yucatecan painters, sculptors and photographers who have given notable examples of the nude.