Provenance: Estate of the artist; Andres Luna de San Pedro Mrs. Grace Luna de San Pedro Mrs. Elizabeth Troster Mrs. Ruth Francis Mario Alcantara (The majority of the collection was purchased by Far East Bank and Trust Company and later on donated to the National Museum of the Philippines) Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

Visually divided into imagined horizontal bands, this composition makes social as well as artistic statements about late 19th century Europe. Artists such as Luna always worked in quick, random sketches outside the tyranny of a frame or preconceived plan. They build storehouses of sketch pads, scrap records of character or mood, piles of chance discoveries, notes on the interplay of light and shadow, the working of forms. Out of this ‘memory bank ‘, they draw richly fertilized ideas which, in time, can emerge as full blown concepts, completed paintings or sculpture. The whole corpus of Luna’s sketches includes magnificent views of late 19th-century Europe. In which the visual language is concise and to the point. Even the apparently random figures are also emblematic of their social status. E Aguilar Cruz wrote in 1975: Even Luna’s most casual oil sketches during his Paris period cannot conceal the vigor of his style as a realist. But more is needed to show what subjects might have increasingly claimed his attention as his infatuation with Paris grew and as the attention which had begun to be showered on him grew likewise.