This retablo painting. of San Isidro Labrador (St. Isidore the Farmer) is, representative of the Peters, Collections, a group of Mexican devotional retablos and a collection of books on religious and folk art presented to Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, in 1993 by Joseph and Ruth Peters, longtime retablo collectors and connoisseurs. Mexican retablos are a 19th- and early 20th-century interpretation of 14th-century European altarpieces. St. Isidore the Farrner was a very popular saint who, spent his entire adult life as a farm laborer outside Madrid. The ox-goad he carries in the retablo symblizes, an occasion on which he is said to have discovered water with it, causing his followers to pray to him when rain was needed.