Museo Posada

Jose Guadalupe Posada was born in Aguascalientes in 1852 and spent his career turning out engravings for penny broadsides - crime stories, disasters, corridos, political satire and, every November, the calaveras: skeletons dressed as revolutionaries, bicyclists, dandies and society ladies, mocking the living by showing them dead and equal. One of those plates, a skeleton in an extravagant feathered hat satirizing Mexicans who aped European fashion, was later named La Catrina by Diego Rivera and became the country's most recognizable image. Posada died poor and was buried in a common grave; the museum beside the Templo del Encino now holds a large collection of his engravings, plates and printed sheets, alongside work by his predecessor Manuel Manilla and rotating exhibitions of graphic art. It is a small, focused museum - two floors of black-and-white pages that repay slow reading, especially for anyone who has met Catrinas in clay, sugar or costume elsewhere in Mexico and wants to see where they came from.

Highlights

• The calavera broadsides - skeletons of every social class.
• The original plates - the engraver's working matrices.
• Manilla's work - Posada's predecessor in the trade.
• The Encino barrio - the church and quiet square outside.

When to go

Any day but Monday; an hour suffices. October and November bring Day of the Dead programming that suits the subject perfectly.

What to expect

It is a graphic-arts museum - small, text-rich and quiet, with Spanish-first labels. Visitors expecting a Catrina spectacle will find prints instead; the Museo Nacional de la Muerte nearby supplies the spectacle.

Nearby

The Museo Nacional de la Muerte and the city's plazas are a short walk; the San Marcos garden lies north.

Key facts