{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":40609,"auction_id":65,"set_id":93,"lot_number":"84","artist":"Teodoro Buenaventura (1863-1950)","title":"Destrito ng Maypajo, Manila","starting_price":120000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated ca.1895 (lower right)","medium":"oil on wood","size":"9” x 12 1/2” (23 cm x 32 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":null,"exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"The tale of Teodoro Buenaventura y Pascual is very much the story of a Dickensian orphan, straight out of ‘Oliver Twist’, or  perhaps more properly ‘Great Expectations.’  Fatherless at fourteen, Buenaventura still managed to transport himself from Paombong, Bulacan to Manila, where he was  discovered by a rich patroness who funded his studies in the country’s only painting academy, the storied Escuela de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado, newly renamed in 1889 and under the joint-directorship of the peninsulares Lorenzo Rocha and Augusto Saenz.  (As it was a segregated school, Lorenzo Guerrero was in charge of teaching the locals, so while no roster of students survives, it is safe to assume that he was mentored by Guerrero, who likewise was in charge of the wunderkind Juan Luna.)  Buenaventura’s career, as in all great Victorian novels, seems to have been eclipsed by larger events and tumultuous  circumstance — those being, in this case, the explosion of the Philippine Revolution, a little more than a year after he won the gold at the Exposicion Regional de Filipinas in 1895.  The arrival of the Yankees jettisoned his chance to be a pensionado of the Academy, with the European education that gilded aristocrats such as Miguel Zaragoza and Felix Pardo de Tavera.  Buenaventura nevertheless had established his reputation as a portraitist, working from his own atelier in Trozo, and joined the meandering transition from the Spanish Academia to the new-fangled University of the Philippines’ Department of Fine Arts, where he was beloved as an instructor of “elementary drawing.” In the first faculty photograph (dated 1909), he sits, pinched and somewhat overshadowed by the more famous men of his time.  Perhaps he would derive some satisfaction if he had known that a century later, his name would be one of the most remembered of his generation.  Buenaventura became a master as well of genre painting, that art form baptised by the French Royal Academy of Arts in the 1600s, that defined its themes as street scenes and peasant life.  In keeping with their function, genre works were also always petite or small in size.  In the first work, titled “Destrito de Maypajo, Tondo, 1911”, we can imagine Buenaventura creating such vistas of the simple life for the many, new American patrons eager to bring home pictorial snapshots of their brand-new colony.  Maps of the period show Maypajo on the outskirts of Tondo, closer to the fields of Caloocan then to the hurly-burly of the urban district.  A thatch hut with an exotic water buffalo (unusual enough for Stateside visitors) and a pair of chickens peck away in the foreground;  a porch-wide bangerra (china shelf) carries a clay pot, and there is a farm boy in the distance, down a winding red-earth path. Pajo is the name of a tiny species of mangoes, now all but extinct, more like olives than fruit; a tree shading the huts seems to be overladen with them.  As for the second work, although untitled, we can make out a serenade (harana) in progress, with the requisite swain holding  a guitar while a round-faced lass peeps coyly out the window.  Interestingly, the suitor strums outside the lumber fence (bakod), along the same visual line as a grazing animal, perhaps Buenaventura’s thinly veiled view of courtship in these islands.","lot_group":"Painting","lot_details_html":"<p><strong>Teodoro Buenaventura</strong> (1863-1950)<br /><em>a.) Destrito ng Maypajo, Manila</em><br />Ca.1895<br />signed (lower right)<br />oil on wood<br />9&rdquo; x 12 1/2&rdquo; (23 cm x 32 cm)<br /><br /><em>b.) Barrio</em><br />Ca.1895<br />signed (lower right)<br />oil on wood or canvas<br />9 3/4&rdquo; x 12&rdquo; (25 cm x 30 cm)</p>","alias":null,"hp":750000,"bp":0.168,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":750000,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":876000,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":39715,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/65/93/lot/84.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":39719,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/65/93/lot/84a.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[450000,500000,550000,600000,650000,700000,750000,800000,900000,1000000,1100000,1200000,1300000,1400000,1500000,1600000,1700000,1800000,1900000,2000000,2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":83,"next":85,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}