{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":60747,"auction_id":203,"set_id":236,"lot_number":"36","artist":"Fernando Amorsolo (1892 - 1972)","title":"Lavandera","starting_price":3400000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1940 (lower right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"17\" x 14\" (43 cm x 36 cm)","property":" PROPERTY FROM THE HON. GEORGE A. MALCOLM COLLECTION","coa":null,"provenance":"Acquired directly from the artist","exhibited":null,"literature":"Malcolm, George A. American Colonial Careerist: Half a Century of Official Life and Personal Experience in the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1957. Title mentioned on page 218 in the chapter \"Of Philippine Culture in its various forms\"","write_up":"Fernando Amorsolo’s lavandera works are amongst the most recurring themes within his oeuvre. An artist with a predilection for all things Filipino, it is no surprise that he admired the feminine pulchritude and emulated it throughout his works. He was trained in the Classical-Romantic style of art, where the nude represented the ideal of beauty. Through it, the artists portray the gods and the naiads, then the bathers and the washerwomen.<br/><br/>In Amorsolo’s oeuvre, the women — and by extension, the nude — was the country itself, a beauty beyond all compare. Women outnumber the men in his many bodies of work, and that, too, is perhaps intentional. In the face of rapid modernization, the dalaga becomes Amorsolo’s assertion of the country’s ideal beauty, the symbol with which the national identity is reaffirmed.<br/><br/>This 1940 lavanderas work tethers right at the edge of the Second World War. The previous decade saw an even faster acceleration of change, and in response, Amorsolo steadfastly continued his bucolic pastoral masterpieces. His daughter, Sylvia Amorsolo-Lazo, wrote of his father’s activities in an email correspondence dated 23 June 2016 (as published by Jane Allinson, Ph.D. in the second volume of Amorsolo: Love & Passion):<br/><br/>“Since there are so many streams or rivers in rural places as well in some urban places, then, and Papa took his going to these places for his on-the-spot sketching and paintings, I think his lavanderas were mostly painted in the provinces of Laguna and Bulacan, and along the Pasig River.”<br/><br/> These provincial excursions gave him a much-needed break from his commissioned works — by the end of the 1930s, Amorsolo’s pastoral works had become so renowned that he had a notebookful of his usual subjects locked and ready for his clients’ perusal — but also a fresh air to fully reimmerse himself within the Philippines’ beautiful topography.<br/><br/>This particular lavandera shows a frontal view of the young woman, as opposed to the usual view from behind that Amorsolo employs. On either side of her sit a batya and a banga, and even more notably, he takes a closer look at both the young woman and the landscape she is in. Bamboo trees frame the right side of the canvas, with the stalks crossing over to the left side. The calm, green water is still, not a ripple in sight, and the act feels strangely intimate. The famous Amorsolo light shines behind her from between the trees, bathing her in an ethereal glow.<br/><br/>Amorsolo’s dalagas, more than anything, is a proclamation of the beauty of our women and our country, with the lavanderas ranking among some of the artist’s most enduring subjects. They are, according to Amorsolo, as Mrs. Sylvia recounts, the “ideal, beautiful Filipinas who lived in a pastoral landscape of woods, streams, and mountains.\" Indeed, as Amorsolo returns again and again to the local washerwomen, he depicts a sweet and dignified young woman, armed with the strength of character that Amorsolo reveres and respects within his Filipino dalaga. (Hannah Andrea Valiente)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":5500000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":5500000,"userBid":34,"isPaid":0,"userId":34,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":19284,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":6608800,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":66762,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/36.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":66979,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/36d.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":66978,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/36c.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":66977,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/36b.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":66976,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/36a.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":35,"next":37,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}