PROPERTY FROM THE ZITA FELICIANO COLLECTION

Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist

Literature: Roces, Alfredo. Anita Magsaysay-Ho: In Praise of Women (With Annotations on Paintings by Anita Magsaysay-Ho. Pasig City: The Crucible Workshop, 2005. Full-color photograph and painting description on page 184. Ong, Charlson, ed. A Sense of Serenity: Anita Magsaysay-Ho with Twelve Filipino Poets. Pasig City: The Crucible Workshop, 1996. fullcolor photograph and painting description on page 65.

ABOUT THE WORK

Anita Magsaysay-Ho is famous for depicting women at work but she also became renowned for capturing their feminine, softer side — praying, dancing, wielding graceful fans, and most of all, wreathed by flowers. She would write of girlhood memories of the Flores de Mayo (the feast of the Flowers of May), carrying bouquets to the Blessed Virgin Mary. “Our parents would prepare special clothes for us; sometimes we would even have flowers in our hair,” she would reminisce. “My sister and I offered flowers together with the daughters of my mother’s friends.” It was a special sense of sisterhood that she would thus associate with flowers; and it was for these friends in Manila’s genteel society that she would create these works. Anita, after all, was from one of the best uppercrust families, descended from one of the men who ruled the waters of Manila Bay with his ships. She was the niece of a beloved Philippine president, was raised by devout parents and attended the the best schools in both the Philippines and America. The work at hand has that same gentle delicacy that inhabited Anita’s private world. Three women are in engrossed in the most lady-like pursuit of flower-arranging. There are fine baskets, a pale celadon jar as well as a bounty of blossoms both from the Philippines (golden butterfly orchids, coral-colored anthuriums, lilies called ‘star gazers’) as well as foreign gardens (baby’s breath, daisies, rose-hued carnations). All the accoutrements of the art of fine living are here to be found. It is engaging and soothing and the best of these, familiar, all at the same time. Her biographer Alfredo Roces would, in fact, devote an entire chapter, entitled “Posy of Bloomers”, to MagsaysayHo’s interior portraits, It was a satisfying theme that animated her work through the decades. Magsaysay-Ho would move to HongKong in the mid1970s and stay 17 years. She would say, I consider this time my most productive years.” This is the era when Women with Flowers was created and one can easily imagine how it was painted for the elegant Mrs. Zita Feliciano, as lithe and svelte as any of the women that Anita Magsaysay-Ho would make iconic. Zita, who was both beloved and well-known in Manila society was one of its legendary swans who would glide through the stratosphere, at home in New York or Paris or London. The work, a gift from one of her closest friends, would properly grace her home and endow it with a very special aura.