Provenance: Collection of the family of Narcisa Rizal, sister of the Philippines National Hero, Jose Rizal, thence by descent

Literature: Pictorial Album on Rizal (Album Pictorico Sobre Rizal), Foremost Filipino Hero, Martyr and Patriot, Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission, Republic of the Philippines, Manila. 1961, Black and white photograph, page 139. Asuncion Lopez Bantug. Lolo Jose: An Intimate and Illustrated Portrait of Jose Rizal, Vibal Publishing, Manila, 2008. Black and white (sepia) photograph, page 136. Sunday Times Magazine. Rizal : Man of Many Minds, June 14, 1970. Black and white photograph, page 30.

ABOUT THE WORK

PUBLIC HISTORY, PRIVATE LIVES AND HIS DREAM OF LOVE RIZAL AND THE PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION by LISA GUERRERO NAKPIL - By the end of June 1892, as Jose Rizal stepped on the deck of the boat Don Juan that would take him from HongKong to Manila, it was already apparent that he had chosen a collision course with his destiny. His letters to his family, the Spanish governor- general and finally and most tellingly, one addressed ‘To the Filipinos’, spoke plainly. His biographer Leon Ma. Guerrero wrote that “he was ready to be shot, and in a way, was expecting it.” He conducted himself, therefore, with a certain devil- may-care air, checking into “the best hotel in the city” (Room 44, of the Hotel Oriente), traveling to Bulacan and Pampanga and Tarlac — and within a week of his arrival, on July 3rd, calling a meeting of the like-minded to found La Liga Filipina. Two days later, the houses he had visited in the provinces outside Manila were raided and copies of the Fili and various subversive pamphlets were seized. The very next day after that, he was sent to incarceration at Fort Santiago escorted by the Governor General’s nephew, riding in his personal carriage. It was a quaint gesture of politeness, as if to say that it was all beyond Despujol’s comprehension. The scholar Jim Richardson notes, “By most accounts, when the Gaceta de Manila reported that he was to be deported from Manila to the south, Andres Bonifacio, Teodoro Plata, and Ladislaw Diwa and others had decided that it was time to proceed” with the plans for the Katipunan. It was July 7, 1892. In a week, Rizal was rousted from his sleep at midnight and sent on a slow boat to Dapitan and would begin his exile in Mindanao on July 17. It would seem that the Spanish colonial government had closed the book on Jose Rizal, the trouble-maker, agitator, and ring-leader, by dispatching him to a faraway town where he could do no more harm. They would be mistaken because Rizal’s exile had set into motion a greater, unseen danger. “While parish friar and police spy, informer and garrison commander, Archbishop and Governor General went chasing after the aproned brethren (of Masonry), the majority of them progressive principales and liberal ilustrados, Bonifacio was quietly but tirelessly working among the masses, whose huts did not seem worth a search, who could be scarcely suspected of being able to write their own names, let alone subversive propaganda, who congregated dumbly in cockpits, circus tents, and dank alleys, and were presumably more concerned with keeping body and soul together and a shirt on their backs, than in the high politics of reform and revolution. These were the faithful, the submissive, the unspoiled... So it was that Bonifacio and the Katipunan escaped and grew,” explained Guerrero. The last four years of Jose Rizal’s life run in parallel with the beginning of the most tumultuous periods of Philippine history. But for Jose Rizal, he sought to create a different Filipino utopia. Between 1892 to 1896, ‘the four years and 13 days and some hours”, Rizal would dance around the cold reality of his exile. He would farm the land, trade in hemp, design an unusual six-sided house and a working water system, build a school and teach, and then finally, he would allow himself to dream — a dream of love with an Irish orphan girl with blue eyes. In January or February 1895, three years into his exile —it was a sentence of indeterminate length really, Josephine Leopoldine Bracken arrived with her adoptive father, George Taufer, an English engineer from Hongkong. Taufer had come to seek Rizal’s help to cure his blindness and Rizal did indeed operate on his eyes. But then the unexpected happened, and Rizal would fall finally and hopelessly in love. And on February 22, Rizal asked for Josephine’s hand in marriage over Taufer’s vehement objections. Josephine would accompany Taufer back to Manila but would soon return to Rizal’s side, by July 1895, they would be living together as man and wife. It is in this period, that the work, a depiction of a sleeping beauty, was created. Josephine lies outstretched on a classical Roman-style couch with a head-rest, covered in a thin blanket that outlines her waist and thighs. A hand modestly covers one breast, she half-smiles innocently in her sleep, tresses parted over her forehead. She is mother, child, and wife all at once. Rizal has signed his name beneath her soft, placid form. It is an intimate and happy depiction of his life and love, a rare exception to his allegorical themes of machismo, knowledge and strength. Or is 'Josephine Sleeping' true to Rizal's inner self and a symbol of his life's concern and his beloved nation now in a deep slumber? “In the life of Rizal, Josephine Bracken plays a special part... that has been too long deprecated and obscured... She is the one woman whom Rizal loved; Leonor Rivera was a boyish fancy, the nostalgic phantom that haunted fitfully his years in exile; all the rest: Consuelo, Suzanne, Gertrude with her breakfast tray, Sei-ko and her tales of the samurai, Nellie the proselytizer, had never really made him pause in his restless journeys, never really pierced the armor of his cold passion for his country and her rights and liberties. “If Rizal can be said to have ever loved anyone else but tthe Filipino Nation, than it must be said that he loved Josephine; he was her husband twice over, her open lover in defiance of all his innate propriety and sensibility; she was the one woman with whom he shared that most jealously prized of all his possessions, his name, and also his heart’s intimacies.”—— Leon Ma. Guerrero, in the ‘The First Filipino : A Biography of Jose Rizal’ inn the life of Rizal,