Josefa de Óbidos (1630 1684) was a Spanish-born, Portuguese painter from the seventeenth century. Her birth name was Josefa de Ayala Figueira, but she signed her work as, "Josefa em Óbidos" or, "Josefa de Ayalla". She is one of the relatively few female European painters known to have been active in the Baroque era. All of her work was executed in Portugal, her father's native country, where she lived from the age of four. Josefa de Óbidos was born in Seville, Spain. Her father, Baltazar Gomes Figueira, was a Portuguese painter from the village of Óbidos. He went to Seville in the 1620s to improve his painting technique and, while there, married Catarina de Ayala y Cabrera, a native Andalusian, who would become the mother of Josefa. The family returned to Portugal in 1634. They first settled in Peniche, where Baltazar continued his work as a painter. It is known that by 1644, at the age of fourteen, Josefa, was in Coimbra in the Convent of The Grace (Convento da Graça), where her father painted the main altarpiece of the church. Josefa's first known works are engravings, executed in 1646. They demonstrate that she had achieved a high degree of skill by the age of sixteen. Sometime before 1653, she and her family left Coimbra and settled in Óbidos. While in Óbidos, she drew an allegory of Wisdom for the Book of Rules of the University of Coimbra, which was being decorated by her father. Highly esteemed as a painter by that time, her father Baltazar is considered to be the <b>...</b>