Provenance:
Private Collection, Barcelona, Spain

ABOUT THE WORK

Art historians often muse : What would Juan Luna have become had his Parisian life not been stopped by his personal tragedy in September 1892. One of his most devoted biographers, E. Aguilar Cruz, wrote “When Luna arrived in Paris in 1885, the French Salon was dying; Impressionism had already passed its zenith, and Neo-Impressionism, its offshoot, was gathering force. From this, one might expect that Luna — already showing signs of discontent with Academism and with the limitations of Grand Manner painting — might have joined ranks with the Impressionists.” He continues, “In the crosscurrents of the different schools which competed for the distinction of representing the spirit of those times, painters like Luna were notable for maintaining their independence from the extremes of academic and anti-academic art. It was such that Luna made his mark as an artist worthy of the best.” By 1886, Luna was on his way to becoming a celebrity, not only among his fellow Filipinos who basked in the reflected glory of his triumph with the bemedalled Spoliarium but with the greater circle of European artists and critics. He had been toasted by José Rizal, was a friend of ilustrados such as Pedro Paterno and married the heiress Paz Pardo de Tavera. With his wife, he had two capacious villas on Rue Pergolese in Paris, one of them used only as his studio. As Aguilar Cruz would remark, ‘Some days, he would pack up his oils and brushes for painting holidays in the fashionable bathing resorts on the Channel coast.” There are works of his done in en plein aire of Noisy-le-Grand as well as of Brittany. This pocket portrait may have been created during one such expedition, painted on the fly, one of “the casual oil sketches” that Aguilar Cruz said “cannot conceal the vigor of his style as a realist.”