ABOUT THE WORK

Felix Lorenzo Martinez was a student of the Manila Academia under Lorenzo Guerrero and there is a record of him traveling to Madrid in 1880 for further studies but not as a scholar of the Ayuntamiento. The following year, he would exhibit a portrait of the then-Governor General of the Philippines, Fernando Primo de Rivera in that capital city’s exposition and it would attract favorable notice from art critics. By 1882, he had returned to Manila and won the first of his various accolades, including a silver medal for a painting of Sta. Teresa de Avila, submitted in time for her 300th death anniversary. He would win various religious commissions (such as the Jesuit church of San Ignacio in Intramuros and some of the interiors of the iron cathedral, San Sebastian), but his most noticeable forte was in portraiture as well as in landscapes, for which he attracted a following. He would join the Regional Exposition of 1895 in Manila, where his portraits of the Queen Regent Maria Cristina and her son Alfonso XIII received gold medals. A fine work, entitled, “Governor Blanco and His Troops” is currently housed in the National Museum of the Philippines. Martinez would participate in the Philippine General Exposition in Madrid of 1887, shortly after this work was painted. His skill for landscapes would begin when he first attained fame as one of the most prolific painters of the monumental ‘grand edition’ of Manuel Blanco’s Flora de Flipinas. Of the 389 plates, he produced 50 of them. (Lorenzo Guerrero, his mentor, accounted for 40.) It was an elite assembly of talent that included the prize-winning pair of Academia pensionados, Felix Resurrección Hidalgo and Miguel Zaragoza. And when the Zaragoza brothers founded the ‘elegant publication’ La Ilustracion Filipina, it was Martinez they recruited to contribute illustrations. Several such lithographs of his landscapes of the river Pasig were published there, portraying similar charming scenes where the rivulets meandered. Napindan is a quaint part of old Taguig and its channel is where the Pasig River meets Laguna Bay. It has a historic lighthouse which was said to be a secret meeting place for the Katipunan which Andres Bonifacio preferred as it could be reached easily by banca from Tondo. In the work at hand, a rather capacious thatch hut perches in typical Tagalog fashion on the riverbank — for ‘Tagalog’ is an abbreviation for the tribe’s name of ‘taga-ilog’ or ‘the men from the river.’ Here one sees how life would easily center around the water, the washing of the day hung out to dry in a colorful line; the fisherman plumbing the waters for the day’s meal; and his wife returning home, a child in tow in one hand while balancing a basket of washing in her other. She saunters towards a stony bridge in the still waters. One can see though that the stream is sufficiently deep to moor two narrow boats, which not only provide easy transportation but also possibly a second livelihood. Chickens move placidly through the grass. In the distance, the daybreak’s pink clouds rise above the horizon. The glasslike sheen of the river and the towering palms complete the serenity of this picture.