{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":46056,"auction_id":93,"set_id":122,"lot_number":"95","artist":"Fernando Amorsolo (1892 - 1972)","title":"Smoke over the Ocampo Pagoda Mansion","starting_price":1800000,"signed_dated":"signed, dated 1944 and inscribed \"Manila Sept 22 1944, 9:30 am\" (lower right)","medium":"oil on wood","size":"10\" x 14 1/2\" (25 cm x 37 cm)","property":"PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF A DISTINGUISHED FAMILY","coa":null,"provenance":null,"exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"Fernando Amorsolo: Chronicler of the War<br><br> The Japanese occupation left the quinquagenarian (a person in their 50s) Fernando Amorsolo scarred and horror-stricken, overwhelmed with the trauma of ruthless destruction and carnage. \"Amorsolo was a diabetic, and the war years made medication extremely difficult,\" writes Roces in his monograph Amorsolo. Roces tells of a gripping story of businessman-cum-US intelligence named Chick Parsons, who \"recounted that right after the Battle of Manila, he traveled about on motor scooter bringing drugs for the sick. Among those in need of insulin was painter Amorsolo, whom Parsons found lying in bed in a dim corner of his studio.\" <br><br>\"Don Luis Araneta,\" also writes Roces, \"recounted how Amorsolo would come to his office with a small landscape and ask, somewhat hesitantly, if he could possibly get 30 pesos for the work.\" <br><br>In a September 2022 ANCX article, \"The other side of Amorsolo: How the master of light captured Manila's dark period,\" Sylvia Amorsolo-Lazo recalls that her father and the other boys in the family lived in a house along Calle Azcarraga (Recto Avenue) while the girls transferred to another home in Raon belonging to Mr. Kraut. Deciding to stay in their Morayta house was almost a death sentence for Amorsolo, for the Japanese turned the Far Eastern University into a garrison just a few blocks away from where Amorsolo lived.<br><br> The Morayta house became a silent witness to the aging Amorsolo's anxieties and enduring creative catharsis to continuously cleanse himself of the traumas of war. \"My father would paint every day,\" Mrs. Sylvia reminisces. \"He hated being idle, but during the War, he believed that it was important and that he needed to record what was happening around him.\"<br><br> \"My father had a collection of newspapers of every single day of the War,\" Mrs. Sylvia adds. \"He used his works to depict the war crimes and the refugee crisis… It reminds me of when he told us he had to go to Bulacan to fetch a cavan of rice. Manila was starving. There was little food to be had. It was a terrifying experience, and the Japanese kempeitai or military police stopped them and even took a portion of the rice.\"<br><br> \nThe work at hand would be one of those works Amorsolo \nconceived and produced en plein air. (Amorsolo's color \nstudies and plein air works, notes Roces, \"were mostly \npainted on wood or lawanit board panels, usually 9 ¼\" x 13\" \nin size…He worked directly with oil and brush.”) Painted at the \nheight of the war, the work depicts the morning after the first \nAmerican air raid and bombing of Manila on 21 September \n1944 against the Japanese. Amorsolo painted this on the \nrooftop of his Morayta house, where he had a harrowing \npanorama of the bloodbath and destruction of war. Quiapo's \niconic landmark, the Ocampo Pagoda Mansion—the home \nof lawyer, real estate tycoon, and art collector Jose Mariano \nOcampo, is dwarfed by an ominous smoke emanating from \nthe historic district's scorched environs. <br><br>\nThe swirl of heavy impastos, the quick and short strokes \ncommunicated through the sheer intensity of somber colors, \nand the deliberate blurring of minute details all point out \nto Amorsolo's inherent sense of agitation at the moment \nas he witnessed the horrors of war unfold before him and \nimmediately translate it to graphic anecdotes on canvas.<br><br>\nAmorsolo painted this the morning (he annotates in the \npainting's lower right the words \"Manila Sept 22 1944 \n9:30 am) after the turbulence of September 21. The \nbillowing smoke presages the impending brutality that \nwould be inflicted upon the people of Manila by American \nindiscriminate shelling and bombing and the massacre by \nthe Japanese forces.<br><br>\nA companion piece to this work was formerly in the Don \nLuis Araneta collection. Titled \"Explosion,\" it depicts the \nfateful night during the bombing of Manila by American \nplanes on September 21. Like the work at hand, it was \nannotated by Amorsolo with the words \"Manila, 5:20 pm \nSeptember 21, 1944.\"<br><br>\n\"Amorsolo painted his pictures of the war with no interest \nin pleasing his customers. He did many oils right on the \nspot as the emotion moved him. He must have reacted to \nthe need to record the chaos around him,\" Roces succinctly \nnotes. (Adrian Maranan)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":1900000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":1900000,"userBid":7390,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":2283040,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":45423,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/93/122/lot/95.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[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":94,"next":96,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}