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

Provenance: Provenance: Private Collection, USA

ABOUT THE WORK

This work evokes the joy of life in the deep woods. The lovely effect of light through heavy summer foliage and moving reflective surface of water were favorite themes of Amorsolo. Yet as much as Amorsolo caught the fleeting effect of light, his picture reveals the intense, almost festive life of country folk, predominantly women, within a forest glade, and suggests a timeless and enduring scene. The colorist in Amorsolo discovered the painterly brilliance of the Philippine sun and distilled this special light even in the pastel surface colors of the fabrics the women are wearing. He invested rural people with dignity and country life with a feeling of contentment. This idyll was painted in 1940, thus capturing the optimistic spirit and grace of peacetime Philippines before the Pacific War of 1941. In his landscapes and genre paintings, he used the technique of backlighting in which the figures are situated against the light, thus outlining them with a golden glow; he preferred to paint in natural light, learning to be quick and decisive in his work since “light changes rapidly and you had to be fast in order to catch the mood with which you started out.” The river reflects the effects of the sunlight passing through the bamboo groves in much the same way that the river in Wallis' The Stonebreaker is gilded over. There is a freshness about the picture; an overall vision is an outcome of a response to nature and to certain aspects of the human environ in the province that was always authentic, strong, and lyrical. The female figures are finely observed, while the movement and translucence of the water are portrayed with a masterly touch. Amorsolo’s confident handling of the individual figures aside, they are set apart into two groups by the river yet are integrated in the composition, and were probably made from a series of separate studies. Amorsolo is a master in arranging the figures in distinct and yet related groups, as well as the value of revealing the emotions of participants in an action through their gestures and expressions. We may never know if Amorsolo was always willing to sacrifice topographical accuracy to produce a better picture and this is nowhere better demonstrated than in this picture of two groups of people doing various activities on opposite banks of a rushing brook. It brings to the fore those simple or seemingly elusive qualities for which Amorsolo’s art has always been famous: harmony, repose, a sense of order, and the creation of an image of nature more perfect than nature itself. The painting touchingly evokes the enchanted mood of life in the past that our forebears can only recall with sepia-colored memories. It suggests a rural arcadia, emphasizing not the roughness of the wilderness but the carefree atmosphere of an afternoon by the river, where the women, graceful and charming, marks time while doing banal tasks. The bucolic mood and timeless setting looks back to the fete galantes of 18th-century painting.