This piece is accompanied by a certificate issued by Mrs. Sylvia Amorsolo-Lazo confirming the authenticity of this lot

Provenance: George and Helen Cunningham, parents of my paternal grandmother, Martha Cunningham, were Presbyterian missionaries in the 1920's. They were based on Negros Island but also spent time in the Philippines nearer Manila. (Helen had originally thought she would work with Pearl S. Buck in China, but because they had children, they wouldn't let them come to China because it was a dangerous time there.) George was a missionary at a teaching university in the Philippines that was founded by another missionary, called Silliman University, which still exists today. George and Helen Cunningham had their portraits painted by Fernando Amorsolo. These portraits hung in Silliman University. George and Helen bought the "Noonday Meal" painting dated 1938 by Amorsolo directly from the artist. -Stephanie Kringle

ABOUT THE WORK

A young woman is cooking the mid-day meal in an earthenware pot over a fire, to her right are yams in a basket. Sitting with her is an elderly man, perhaps her father, resting a while out of the harsh sunlight, a wooden hook for gathering rice stalks is still in his hands. It is much cooler in the shade, the vegetable vine dark against the heat. Amorsolo, challenged with the task of depicting verdant stalks of rice, meticulously applied the thick paint with a small flat brush. This must be one of Amorsolo’s earliest versions of this subject: his colors are more intense, and his approach more painterly, than those made rather formulaically, later.