The gallery conserves and exhibits paintings from the viceregal period and the nineteenth century in Yucatan. Opened in July 1981, the Juan Gamboa Guzmán State Art Gallery is named in honor of the most famous Yucatecan painter of the nineteenth century. It is housed in an historical monument of the seventeenth century, which incorporates part of the church of El Jesús and the College (later University) of St. Francis Xavier, which belonged to the Jesuits until 1767, when Charles III expelled them from New Spain, and from the rest of the Spanish Empire. The collection was mainly inherited from the defunct Yucatan History and Archeology Museum, and the display covers painters from the viceregal period to the present day.

Painting of the pre-Independence period is represented by oil paintings of priests and bishops, as well as paintings of saints and the Virgin Mary. By contrast, the nineteenth century mainly focuses on the portraits of governors and illustrious personages of the period. Juan Gamboa Guzmán (1853-1892) deserves a special mention. He left three pencil drawings from his time in Paris as an art student, the oil painting Heavenly Music (Música celestial), considered the best Yucatecan painting of the nineteenth century, together with Carnival Idyll (Idilio de carnaval), The Tryst (La unión) and a portrait of Gabriel Vicente Gahona Pasos (1828-1899), the Yucatecan printer, cartoonist and painter known by the moniker of “Picheta,” who was his teacher. Picheta himself has his own display area with some of his prints in the nineteenth-century satirical style of the Yucatan. Finally in the “Bronze Maya” gallery there are works by Enrique Gottdiener (1909-1986), a sculptor of Austrian origin, whose work gives an intense and original perspective on the people and culture of the Yucatan in the twentieth century.

The gallery’s principal space used to be the sacristy of the Church of Jesus during the viceregal period. The first space has a wide barrel vault roof decorated with four fine ribs, with broad supporting masonry walls, whose dimensions give a monumental feeling. The upper floor gallery has a vaulted ceiling with a half sphere cut at right angles on four sides. This was the “red confessional,” the place where the Jesuit priests went to confession.

The space where the works of Gamboa Guzmán are displayed with its beautiful baroque staircase, as well as the upper part of the building, which has the “Bronze Maya” display and the nineteenth century Mexican presidents and Yucatan governors gallery were all part of the University of St. Francis Xavier.