In the first decades of the eighteenth century, the brothers Juan and Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez, who descended from a prominent dynasty of painters, were the leading artists of the day, around whom others congregated. They instigated a stylistic shift and were the impetus behind the establishment of an independent painting academy in about 1722. Through an academic approach to learning based on copying and drawing, and aided by the arrival of many new prints and paintings from Europe, these artists and their contemporaries perfected their compositional skills. They refined their depiction of space and architecture and paid increasing attention to the anatomical correctness of figures by employing live models.

In 1720 Juan Rodríguez Juárez reached the pinnacle of his career. His Ascension of Christ, with its fresh style and fluid brushstrokes, epitomizes this mastery. Even bolder is his Apotheosis of the Eucharist, considered a tour de force in its day. Artists affiliated with the Rodríguez Juárez brothers, such as their cousin Antonio de Torres, participated in this pictorial renewal. José de Ibarra and Francisco Martínez inherited these innovations, becoming leading artists of their generations, as did Miguel Cabrera, Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz, and Francisco Antonio Vallejo. Overall, painters during this period combined their individual styles with accepted (and at times eclectic) standards of taste, producing complex and highly innovative works of art.

Due to a growing demand for images that conveyed complex stories about the lives of saints, the Virgin, and Christ, narrative painting saw a resurgence in eighteenth-century Mexico. Often conceived as series, many of these works decorated the interiors of churches, convents, colleges, and other public spaces, where they became activated through their arrangements, including as parts of altarpiece ensembles (retablos). In adopting a more organic, idealized, and at times idyllic sensibility, these works also increasingly placed emphasis on domestic interiors and everyday elements to establish a closer connection with the viewer and to humanize the evangelical message.

The secularization of religious painting is exemplified by Miguel Cabrera's masterpiece, The Miracle of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga and the Novice Nicholas Celestini, which combines everyday still-life motifs and celestial visions to render the miraculous story more credible.

The introduction of academic principles in the art of Mexico is generally connected with the arrival of the Spanish engraver Jerónimo Antonio Gil, who founded Mexico's Royal Academy of San Carlos in 1783. This perspective overlooks the trajectory of local artists, who long sought to have painting recognized as a noble rather than a mechanical art. Earlier in the eighteenth century, painters organized several independent academies (ca. 1722, 1754, and 1768), where they engaged in discussions about the theory and practice of their art. Although painters in New Spain had emphasized the importance of drawing since the establishment of professional guilds in the sixteenth century, it was not until the eighteenth century that they began to draw from live models at their academic gatherings. This practice resulted in paintings with more naturalistic and anatomically correct figures.

The eighteenth century was fruitful for the invention of new iconographies, some of which have come to epitomize New Spanish painting. The expression "paintings of the land" (pinturas de la tierra) refers to works made in Mexico or representing local subjects, including peoples, customs, and places. Although the tradition of vedute, large-scale paintings of cityscapes or vistas, emerged in Mexico in the late seventeenth century, some of the most salient examples date to the eighteenth. Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz's topographical views of Mexico City, which stand out for their ostensible objectivity, are a deliberate attempt to "localize" a European genre and offer an idealized image of the city.

Casta painting provides a similarly contrived view of viceregal life. Invented in New Spain, this genre categorizes and ranks the different socioracial groups of the colony, attempting to impose order on what was perceived to be a mostly hybrid and therefore unruly society. The works lavish extraordinary detail on costumes and other local elements. A comparable sartorial focus appears in some of the period's Asian-inspired folding screens (biombos). The one exhibited here transforms a French fête galante (courtship party) into a New Spanish leisure scene populated by local stock types.

In the eighteenth century, Mexico saw an upsurge in portraiture that was associated with the economic growth of the viceroyalty. Different, particularly urban, social groups commissioned artists to paint their likenesses. In a hierarchical society that placed a premium on nobility of birth as well as piety, wealth, titles, and merits, portraiture had the power to convey both corporate and personal meanings, allowing sitters to fashion and refashion their identities and project them onto society. Portraiture also fulfilled a genealogical role, preserving the memory of religious and secular families and institutions. Dress and other attributes became essential to the production and reception of meaning, as did detailed inscriptions that described the origin, merits, and character of the sitters.

Some portraits enabled the elite to promote their status publicly, as in Juan Rodríguez Juárez's portrayal of Pedro Sánchez de Tagle, a merchant who made his fortune in New Spain and commissioned his likeness to be displayed alongside that of the viceroy. Ignacio María Barreda's extravagant Portrait of Doña Juana María Romero, which includes a fake coat of arms, served to legitimize the sitter's newly found riches and standing. Other portraits commemorated the entry of young women into convents and were commissioned by their families to signal their social prestige. The various modalities of the genre increasingly challenged painters to understand, interpret, and codify the ambitions of their patrons.

Often commissioned by ecclesiastical orders to instruct in issues of faith, New Spanish allegorical images are fascinating manifestations of a culture that relied increasingly on its own visual metaphors. These images enjoyed wide appeal among learned and popular circles, in part because of their ambiguous, gentle, and mysterious subjects, which could express many things concurrently. Allegorical paintings can be broadly divided into four categories: guides to inner spirituality for cloistered nuns and monks, teaching or mnemonic tools to aid in the practice of piety, symbols that commemorated local devotions, and commentaries that extolled (or criticized) figures of power.

Some allegories were conceived as large-scale paintings that covered the walls of institutions and liturgical spaces, as is the case of José de Páez's monumental canvases depicting the souls in purgatory, where neither rich nor poor are spared from suffering. Notable too are images that document a pantheon of local cults, such as those that celebrate the conceding of papal patronage to the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1754, the long-awaited declaration of the Immaculate Conception as patron saint of Spain and all its possessions in 1760, or the official recognition of the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1765. It is therefore not surprising that many allegories stand halfway between a medieval, archaizing language and a more contemporary sensibility that alludes to the religious and political vicissitudes of the time.

Imagining the sacred was a substantial part of the painter's activity in early modern Catholic society. Although most subjects continued to be universal, sacred painting saw significant developments in eighteenth-century New Spain, yielding a richness of themes, pictorial approaches, and devotional strategies. The most visible public images were large paintings of well-known miracle-working sculptures. José de Ibarra's depiction of Christ of Ixmiquilpan and the monumental Virgin of Sorrows attributed to Nicolás Enríquez rank among the most powerful examples of this genre because of the way they convey divine presence. The sculptures, depicted on their altars, tower over the viewer and are surrounded by detailed renditions of altar accoutrements—curtains, candles, silver pedestals, vases, flowers—indicating that setting and place were as important as the cult image itself. The histories of such cult images often recount how they displayed signs of life (perspired, wept, bled, twitched, blinked, or gazed at the viewer), reinforcing their divine power. Individual devotional experience was commonly channeled through smaller, more intimate paintings, many on copper, in which painters demonstrated great precision and skill.