PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF A DISTINGUISHED FAMILY

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

ABOUT THE WORK

In 1919, the industrialist Enrique Zobel de Ayala would send the young Fernando Amorsolo to further his education in Spain. He would enrol in the very same academy, the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where all the Filipino greats had gone from Luna to Resurreccion Hidalgo to Zaragoza. Ramon N. Villegas noted that Amorsolo’s test results were so excellent that he was invited to join the academy not as a student but as an instructor. It was in Madrid that Amorsolo would fall under the influence of the impressionistic light of Joaquin Sorolla (1863 - 1923). It was thanks to Sorolla that Amorsolo discovered the infinite possibilities of the Philippine sun: The rose-colored streaks of its sunrises and sunsets; the reflections on dappled rice fields; the shade of a gnarled mango tree; even the dancing flames of a campfire. Amorsolo would return to Manila after traveling through Europe and the United States in 1920. He would reprise his uncle Fabian de la Rosa’s prize-winning work, calling it Rice Planting, in 1921. By 1924, Fernando Amorsolo was a name to reckon with. In this rare view of a hacienda. it is a bright, summer’s day. A red-pantalooned farmer cuts away at the last of the harvest, having cleared a neat square beside what looks like the tracks of a mechanized rail. At one end are two thatch-covered huts, one covers a primitive mill. There are two bovines. One senses the cool of the shade under two lush trees. This painting is a parable of the just reward of a hard day’s work.