{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":56501,"auction_id":110,"set_id":144,"lot_number":"75","artist":"Fernando Amorsolo (1892 - 1972)","title":"Sunday Morning Going to Town","starting_price":8000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1963 (lower right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"28” x 39 1/2” (71 cm x 100 cm)","property":"PROPERTY FROM THE JOHN OVENSTONE COLLECTION","coa":null,"provenance":"Acquired directly from the artist","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"By the mid-1960s, Fernando Amorsolo had been showered with much-deserved acclaim, solidifying his incomparable legacy of shaping and defining Philippine art. The most important of these recognitions materialized in 1967 when Amorsolo was honored by the Independence Day National Committee of the Republic of the Philippines with its Republic Cultural Heritage Special Award in Painting. Notably, the Republic Cultural Heritage Award was the precursor to the National Artist Award, which would be posthumously given to Amorsolo in 1972. <br /><br /> More than all these honors, Amorsolo remained steadfast in his commitment to being, first and foremost, a family man. <br /><br /> Amorsolo's daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Amorsolo-Lazo, once recounted in a 2024 interview with Leon Gallery, \"My Papa actually was a very family man. He was very loving and generous and instilled in us the values of simplicity, generosity, and truthfulness. Although he had this passion for his art, his family was still number one.\" <br /><br /> She continued, \"When we were young, we used to sleep on the floor with Papa. The eight of us and Mama are all in his studio. All of us stayed in one room…and he was really that close to us until we grew older. That was the time when we had our rooms already, but then, every time we went on the spot, he would always bring his family along, and sometimes he would even play with us after work. After dinner, he would take some time talking with us before we go to sleep.\" <br /><br /> Sunday Morning Going to Town, with title variations including Sunday Morning Going to Church and Going to the Fields, is a theme where Amorsolo celebrated the importance of honoring familial values. The family, bearing the utmost singular importance in Filipino society, became the protagonist in many of his brightly lit canvases, from which a sense of undying optimism in relation to traditional family values of harmony and integrity sprang forth. <br /><br /> Writer and art historian Jane Allinson, in her essay \"Amorsolo and the American Experience,\" published in the book Maestro Fernando C. Amorsolo: Recollections of the Amorsolo Family, noted that \"Idealized agricultural Philippine scenes are the heart of Amorsolo's work,\" depicting an idealized agricultural Philippines devoid of the rapid modernization and urbanization that had swept through the country since the American colonial period. Moreover, Amorsolo maintained to capture and preserve an ideal of the Filipino family. <br /><br /> Similarly, Sunday Morning Going to Town's theme of family leisure on peaceful Sundays evokes the Amorsolo family's weekends, where the maestro would bring his family to nearby countryside spots and bond with them over picnic lunches while basking in its seemingly boundless peace and quiet, a temporary respite from the hustle and bustle of urban living. <br /><br /> \"I remember that every time we would go on the spot, usually Papa would bring us. [But it always] turned out to be a picnic,\" Mrs. Lazo recounted. <br /><br /> The overall composition of Sunday Morning Going to Town is one of brightness and hope. It captures the harmony between the family—from which the importance of collective living is first honed—and the agricultural roots of Filipino society, where people revel in a shared sense of community and belongingness and one with the blessings of nature. Amorsolo hopes that Filipino familial values be maintained for generations to come, values he deemed vanishing along with the blissful beauty of the countryside that he once cherished and loved. (Adrian Maranan)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":9000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":9000000,"userBid":5930,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":10814400,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":60284,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/110/144/lot/75.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":60734,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/110/144/lot/75a.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":60733,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/110/144/lot/75c.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":60732,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/110/144/lot/75b.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":74,"next":76,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}