Provenance: Don Pedro Alejandro Paterno (1857– 1911) and Doña Luisa Piñeyro de Lugo y Merino (Sra de Paterno, d. 1897)

ABOUT THE WORK

A Glimpse of Other Lives Before Juan Luna would embark on his life-changing path to art and glory, his first dream was to become a seafaring man. He would first enroll at the Escuela Nautica de Manila together with his elder brother Manuel in 1869 when he was just 12 years of age and graduate when he was 1. The Escuela was an academy that turned out sailors for the merchant marine, and one senses that he had none of the desire for book learning that his father and other brothers had: Antonio and Jose had scientific turns of mind and would become a pharmacist and doctor, respectively. In 1873 and 1874, he would actually set sail as a teenager and an apprentice officer; traveling to Amoy, Batavia, Singapore, Colombo and HongKong. Like Manuel, who loved music, he would eventually turn to the arts. His biographer Carlos da Silva would note that “inspired by the drawings of his brother Jose, he took private lessons in drawing, while his ship was in port, under the Filipino painter Don Lorenzo Guerrero in the latter’s studio in Ermita.” He arrived with Manuel in the Spanish peninsula in 1877 : he, to enrol in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid; Manuel to enroll in the Real Conservatorio de Musica in the same city. This particular work at hand, of a dark-haired beauty lounging in bed, and who seems perhaps to be entranced by her own reflection, is audacious in so many ways : It suggests an exotic world that Luna would later explore in his various ‘Odalisques’: the mystique of slave girls, bejeweled with rings on her fingers and bracelets on her wrists. A thin scarlet ribbon is in her hair. Written on the reverse of what appears to be this early work is “Islas Canarias.” It would have a port of call for a mariner. The Canary Islands were the last Spanish port of call on the route to Africa, from the city of Cadiz. (Manuel writes out a receipt to Don Pedro Paterno, found elsewhere in this auction, for a loan of money to complete his passage from that city.) Found among the personal papers of Don Pedro Paterno, it can be surmised that this was a sort of memento of other lives. (Lisa Guerrero Nakpil)