Leon Gallery wishes to thank Mrs. Sylvia Amorsolo-Lazo for confirming the authenticity of this lot

Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist

ABOUT THE WORK

This extremely rare ‘Wartime’ Amorsolo may be the first of the Maestro Fernando Amorsolo’s pictorial representations of World War II. Dated 1944, it is both a recalled impression of the first bombings of Manila in 1941 and a foretelling of the devastation of the forthcoming Battle of Manila in February 1945. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a newspaper account dated December 29, 1941 reports, “Japan answered the American proclamation of Manila as an open city by dumping two salvos of bombs at least a mile and a half from the capital’s port area, starting fires. There were six air raids on Friday, resulting in 32 casualties including women and children. At least a dozen bombs fell in the famed wall-city put up by the Spaniards. The men are battling with the flames. Residents in the congested districts had been hurriedly evacuated. Tragic losses are feared. Many prominent buildings were destroyed.” Fernando Amorsolo before and after the war was beloved for his famously recognizable trope of a sun-kissed, blessed Filipino countryside. His wartime interlude depicting a city and its citizens in peril — is just the opposite. The reds and gold he once used to outline a bountiful sunrise now color a Manila on fire. Some say the paintings he produced in this period are among his most authentic and intense. The small size of the work reflects those days’ scarcity of canvas; Amorsolo may have created this work from the immediacy of a memory of an air raid, possibly precariously perched from a tall, still unleveled building. On the left is the outline the Great Eastern Hotel, its flat roof and signage marking it as the tallest building in the 1940s; to the right are the oriental turrets of the Ocampo Pavilion, the rest is a jumble of now-forgotten structures that would have slipped away in Amorsolo’s remembrance as they do from ours today. Still, this is an indelible and yes, beautiful memorial of that time. (Lisa Guerrero Nakpil)