{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":60824,"auction_id":203,"set_id":236,"lot_number":"113","artist":"Fernando Amorsolo (1892 - 1972)","title":"Noon Day Meal","starting_price":6000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1950 (lower right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"24\" x 33\" (61 cm x 84 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Private collection, Manila","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"Fernando Amorsolo would singlehandedly create the world of the happy patriot. Not for him the thunder and lightning of a gladiator’s death in the “Spoliarium” of Juan Luna, nor the tearful Christian virgins under the heel of the Roman empire, conjured by Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo. Belonging to a more peaceful time, Amorsolo believed that love of country could be expressed in harmony and not in conflict. That unique optimism still strikes a chord with everyone, creating and inspiring a new kind of patriotism.
Fernando Amorsolo was born on practically the last day of May in 1892. It would be entirely fitting that the man who celebrated an eternal summer in his works would be born in that sunlit month. His family, however. would move from Paco, Manila to Daet, Camarines Norte by Christmas of that year. They would stay there until his father’s passing, 11 years later. Almost certainly, Amorsolo’s love for the great Philippine outdoors first took root in those pastoral years, a few towns away from the majestic Mayon Volcano, which would grace many of his paintings, amid the lush rice fields and fruit trees of Bicol.
His mother, Bonifacia Cueto, would finally return to the capital after two years, exhausted by the struggle of raising six boys single-handedly. They would take refuge with her cousin, the now-prosperous Fabian de la Rosa y Cueto.
Fabian de la Rosa was himself a second-generation artist, a nephew of one of Manila’s most famous portraitists — Simon Flores y de la Rosa. A student at the Manila Academia, he had also won a scholarship at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the same legendary arts college that Luna and Hidalgo had attended in Madrid. The Manila Academia’s funds to send Fabian abroad, however, would run out, but no matter, Fabian would find himself in the orbit of the Luna brothers when they set up a fencing school in Manila.
De la Rosa would later become the star of the next generation to follow Luna and Hidalgo, painting Manila’s rich and famous in portraits of the country’s who’s who — but he also loved to chronicle the lives of the working woman. It would be twin themes that his nephew, Fernando Amorsolo, would follow in his own life.
Bonifacia had supposedly sent her famous cousin, the young Fernando’s drawings, and Fabian would be persuaded to take his nephews — chiefly Fernando and his brother Pablo — under his wing. They began as his manchadors and then as his able apprentices. (Fernando would thus formally begin under de la Rosa’s tutelage at just 13.) It was from him that the Amorsolo siblings would learn the foundations of superb techniques that would only sharpen their talents.
While De la Rosa’s paintings would embody the 20th-century Filipino identity, in a brand-new country perforce idealized under the new colonial masters, it would be Fernando Amorsolo who would make his own sun-dappled paradise famous across the Philippines.
The maestro of the landscape would, however, remain undiminished; a statesman of the canvas who would rule, uncompromisingly, for half a century. Amorsolo would pass away on another summer’s day in 1972. The heart that had made him, in turn, one of the most beloved of Filipino artists simply gave way. In recognition of his magnificent talent and exquisite contributions to the Philippine spirit, this poet of the Filipino soul was named the country’s very first National Artist for the Visual Arts in the same year.
The nation’s very first Philippine National Artist for the Visual Arts could only have been Fernando Amorsolo y Cueto, titan of the Philippine landscape, poet of the Filipino soul — and architect of a profound patriotism.
It was thanks to the Spanish master Sorolla that Amorsolo discovered the infinite possibilities of Philippine light: The rosecolored streaks of its sunrises and sunsets; the reflections on dappled rice fields; the shade of a gnarled mango tree; even the dancing flames of a campfire.
In the magnificent painting at hand, Amorsolo creates an embarrassment of riches in a single masterpiece, a perfectly balanced composition of his most famous and beloved characters. The maestro, it is said, would have a worn album at the ready for his well-heeled clientele to pick out just which of these archetypes they would like set into his artworks.
In the foreground, a young beauty stirs an earthenware pot over a lively flame, one slender foot arched over the wooden slipper known as ‘bakya.’ Another maiden, her wide-brimmed hat thrown carelessly to one side, sits on the thick roots of an ancient mango tree, with a basket on her lap. Amorsolo’s favorite vision of motherhood, a Madonna carrying a baby girl dressed in a rosy pink cotton dress, stands watching her daughter taking over what was once her own maternal duties. The patterns of the women’s striped aprons (tapis) echo this connection.
Shafts of newly-harvested rice are strewn in abundant piles around the family. They are the perfect symbols of plenty. Two new elements, however, now appear in what is otherwise Amorsolo’s most familiar mise en scène. These are a dark water buffalo seeking shade under the same leafy tree, and a be-hatted man working a hand-thresher. (Its bamboo outline can be spied just past the scene.) The carabao is the traditional draft animal of the smallholder farmer and is still an important fixture and symbol of the simple life. The man in the background is likewise a recognizable character in Amorsolo’s scenes, depicting one of his favorite ‘katiwala’ or caretakers, who would cameo in various Amorsolo works as a farmer or a fighting-cock owner.
In the distance, farmers harvest the fields tirelessly, surrounded by the kind of heart-stopping vistas only to be found in the Philippine countryside. It’s a nod to his uncle Fabian de le Rosa’s monumental work, exhibited at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, which won his mentor a gold medal.
This Noonday Meal is also one of Amorsolo’s ample-sized canvases, which are increasingly difficult to find. (Lisa Guerrero Nakpil)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":9500000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":9500000,"userBid":34,"isPaid":0,"userId":34,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":19789,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":11415200,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":66839,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/113.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":67153,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/113c.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":67152,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/113b.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":67151,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/113a.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":112,"next":114,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}