De Leon family, city officials unveil forensic portrait of founding family’s matriarch

Although they weren’t alive to see the day come, that dream finally became a reality as the de Leon family and the city of Victoria unveiled a forensic portrait of the wife of Victoria’s founder, Martin de Leon, Wednesday evening at the Victoria Art League.

“We know from the pictures that are on the internet that are representative of her, aren’t her,” Blanche de Leon said. “If you google, you’ll see all sorts of pictures of Patricia de la Garza from someone putting on Google they wrote a book and say this is Patricia.”

While photography would be invented in her lifetime, de Leon said that any claimed photos of her couldn’t be authentic as photography wouldn’t be prominent until the Civil War.

“There is no way for those photographs to be Patricia,” de Leon said.

With that in mind, the de Leon family commissioned forensic artist Lois Gibson, 73, of Houston, to bring the image of the devout Catholic, educator and mother of 10 to life.

Gibson has carved out a 40 years career as a forensic artist with the Houston Police Department, helping solve cases and identify people across more than 5,000 cases, she said. She started that after she was nearly killed, and it gave her the skill set to bring people back to life through her portraits, and she has been doing so since 2013.

De Leon called around to get a better sense of Gibson’s past work and was sold hearing her previous work, and some of her current work, which includes portraits of defenders of the Alamo, de Leon said.

However, Gibson had never gotten to do the portrait of a woman, and she immediately jumped at the opportunity, Gibson said.

With that, the de Leon family hired Gibson to bring Victoria’s matriarch to life, giving her 75 photos of the various female descendants of the family, de Leon said.

From there, Gibson extrpolated what Patricia de la Garza looked like in 1824, she said.

“Each of the female descendants all had the same thing, this really substantial mandible like Geena Davis or Katharine Hepburn,” she said. “All these traits, I was positive she was beautiful.”

With the photos of the descendants surrounding the 36-by-28-inch silk canvas and Gibson’s linseed oil paint, she brought Victoria’s matriarch back to life in 91 hours in a process that would take other artists a year to complete, she said.

The process is a spiritual experience as she prays for permission from her subjects and gets a sense of who Patricia de la Garza was like, she said.

“My honest opinion. I know the guys who died at the Alamo that was painful, but none of these guys never ended up having 10 kids. She had 10 kids. After that, she deserves a medal,” Gibson said. “It is the best painting I’ve ever done.”

Community and several members of the de Leon family from around the state packed into the Victoria Art League’s building to see Patricia de la Garza for the first time in 174 years.

With female descendants surrounding the portrait, including de Leon, there was no question that the woman in the portrait was their ancestor.

In the portrait stood among nature an elegant woman with a comely smile in a cabernet-colored silk dress holding a rosary in white homemade crochet knitted gloves. Over her dress, she wore a crochet shoulder cover with a pearl cameo. On her head, she wore a black mantilla veil and garnet earrings.

“This was my father’s dream. We did this in honor of our parents,” de Leon said. “We feel the portrait represents all aspects of her life.”

She said that sharing the reveal with the community as a whole was a pleasure.

“It means just as much to them as it does to us,” de Leon said.

The portrait will belong to the de Leon family, but the city of Victoria will have a copy of it, she said.

With the face of Patricia de la Garza brought to life, it will be used to help create a monument of her and Martin de Leon that will be unveiled on April 13, 2024, in Victoria, de Leon said, and 200 years to the exact day Victoria was founded and officially recognized as a Mexican colony as part of the city’s bicentennial celebration.

Kyle Cotton was born and raised in San Antonio and graduated from San Antonio College and the University of Texas at Arlington. Cotton has covered economic development, health care, finance, government, technology, oil and gas and higher education.