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

ABOUT THE WORK

TWO PRINCES : Romulo and Amorsolo by LISA GUERRERO NAKPIL At age 16, Amorsolo would begin that inexorable climb that would make him the most famous artist of his time. He would win the first of his accolades, a contest organized by an influential organization called the Asociacion Internacional de Artistas de Manila, for an exposition for the fine arts in 1908. The following year, he would enter the School of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines, where his uncle was also a professor. Amorsolo would be among the first six graduates to complete the then-five year course. He would next attract the attention of the industrialist Enrique Zobel de Ayala, whose concerns among others included the distillery Ginebra San Miguel. Amorsolo’s label of the avenging archangel slaying the devil-serpent is still used to this day. In 1919, Zobel de Ayala would bankroll his education in Spain in the vey same academy, the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where all the Filipino greats had gone from Resurreccion Hidalgo to Juan Luna 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. Amorsolo would say in later years that it was in Madrid that his art became what it was always destined to become, basking in the dramatic draughtsmanship of Diego Velasquez and the impressionistic light of Joaquin Sorolla (1863 - 1923). It was thanks to Sorolla that Amorsolo discovered the infinite possibilities of Philippine light: 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 Fabian de la Rosa’s work, calling it Rice Planting, in 1921. He would go from strength to strength, painting tirelessly. In the work at hand, Woman with a Banga is perhaps one of the earliest of this winsome theme, a favorite muse carrying an earthenware pot, often used as a metaphor for unsullied simplicity. The deep emerald and bronze of the country girl’s tapis (skirt) and embroidered sleeves echo the cooler colors of the bamboo grove that encircle her. Pale pinks and mauves in heavy impasto suggest a sylvan glade that foretell Amorsolo’s golden age in the 1930s. This seminal masterpiece belonged to another prince of the realm of Filipino arts and culture — Carlos Peña Romulo, who was 7 years younger than Amorsolo but was an equally brilliant rising star. Romulo began as a professor at the University of the Philippines, while serving as the secretary of Manuel L. Quezon when he was president of the Philippine Senate. He would next embark on a storied journalistic career that would make him the influential editor-in-chief in 1931 of the widelycirculated TVT Publications, that was comprised of three different newspapers in as many languages. The fact that he was dexterous in English, Spanish, and Tagalog was no mean feat for a man so young was a watershed for his own golden age. Romulo would become, in fact, the first Filipino to win a Pulitzer Prize a decade later. Woman with a Banga thus represents a halcyon period for men who were twin spirits in the Philippines’ own remarkable age.