Provenance: Private Collection, USA

ABOUT THE WORK

Many pictures, particularly contemporary ones, are painted with museum exhibition in mind. Each one is designed to compete for attention by its individuality. But a genre piece never had and was never supposed to have the appeal of competitive novelty. Each one is painted to be seen by itself, not as part of a gathering of exhibition pieces. To the painters of countryside genre, nature was the only honest source of ideas. Painting, to be good, did not need the approval of authority, whether art academies or public taste. They have a generalized quality, for though they include recognizable or nearly recognizable features from his earlier Stour river paintings, they clearly aim to capture the emotional essence of such scenes, rather than to depict specific topographical locations. Ancheta’s earlier works, including many scenes of Intramuros, such as the Puerta Isabel gate, are notable for the precise definition of architectural forms. Ancheta was little concerned with the rapid development of an urban semi industrial civilization. After the Second world war, Ancheta developed his own vision of landscape or waterscape. A man of simple, generous impulses, his canvasses are as unassuming as the artist. In his later, more “looser” paintings, sensitively adjusted for the slightest change of value, the interplay between light and dark areas is overwhelmed by the presence of the sky, or natural elements. The scenes he painted there reveal something of his nostalgic attitude towards the area. The view has certain timelessness — no fishing boats on the water, no people in the streets- and the only indications of modern life are turned into compositional devices that lock the picture together. The views have certain timelessness — fishing boats on the water — the scenes he painted there reveal something of his nostalgic attitude towards the outdoors.