Travel, auctions, and the Parisian Life
It may not be immediately apparent, but travel and auctions do have a lot in common. Both are spectator sports, enjoyed best with good company; both can nip and tuck your bank account—and both experiences will leave you richer in mind and spirit, far beyond what you paid.
Trotting around the world, for real or in auction rooms, can change your idea of what is common knowledge, shake up the status quo, and as the prescient and popular Ambeth R. Ocampo has pointed out, lure out long-hidden pieces of history, just waiting for a new generation to uncover and appreciate them.
Such is the case of a fascinating photograph of the 19th-century artist Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo that has surfaced for the upcoming León Gallery Kingly Treasures Auction this November 30th. Hidalgo is captured working on an almost unrecognizable but massive painting so tall that he is perched high up on a crude staircase to work on it. He wields an oversized palette, probably so he wouldn’t have had to run up and down the steps so often to fetch new paints. On the reverse is a dedication from a friend and fellow painter, Paul Peel with the date March 1891 scrawled on it.
Thanks to the keen eye of National Museum director Jeremy Barns, (in whose august halls the original hangs), the faded outlines of the ‘Assassination of Governor Bustamante’ can be identified. With the photograph in hand, its art history can now also be re-written. It is now clear that the huge work, heretofore thought to have been painted in 1904 because it was undated, was actually created remarkably 13 years earlier.
Art historians and armchair travelers will recognize the address as not only Hidalgo’s long-time address but also Juan Luna’s when he first arrived in the City of Lights.
But there’s more. In fact, the photograph also opened the door to an entire other world. It reminded me that Hidalgo inhabited a picturesque artist enclave —in Manila terms, a “compound”—consisting of several charming cottages with gabled roofs and half-timbered walls, arranged around a pretty garden filled with flowering plants, statues, and stone paths. It still stands today at No. 65 Boulevard Arago in Paris, pretty much in the same condition as it was 130 years ago, thanks to France’s serious commitment to history and heritage. And I had managed to walk in and around it.
Art historians and armchair travelers will recognize the address as not only Hidalgo’s long-time address but also Juan Luna’s when he first arrived in the City of Lights. Thanks to a special tour arranged by Martin Arnaldo, a Filipino ex-pat film director who knows every nook and cranny of the Ilustrado Paris, I crashed both studios. I was on a quest not only to see the ateliers of these two masters but also to re-trace the footsteps of my grand-uncle, Ariston Bautista Lin (the third man in the famous Juan Luna painting ‘Parisian Life’, ogling the coquette beside Luna and a priggish Jose Rizal.) I could now bring him better to life in my mind’s eye, calling on his chums, perhaps even stumbling up the steps after a night on a town or maybe carrying off a painting or two.
Luna and Hidalgo lived side by side in a duplex set-up, two doors side by side in a single villa, each with identical spaces, each with ceilings two floors high, and skylights and windows on one end. That would have flooded their studios with the wonderful natural light of the soft European sun—and allowed them to create massive “history” works as well as gorgeous lifelike portraits, capturing the subtle shades of pale skin and rose-tinted cheeks, expensive velvets and taffetas of their sitters.
One such portrait, titled the ‘Portrait of Raimunda Chuidian Roxas’ (also in the November Leon auction) was without a doubt painted by Hidalgo in this very studio and in 1890, just a year before the photograph was taken. Madame Raimunda, like the Pardo de Taveras, was a member of the gilded Filipino social set composed of enormously wealthy landlords and factory owners who could afford to live like French dukes and duchesses in Paris. She was, after all, the older sister of the richest man in the Philippines, the sugar mogul and financier Telesforo Chuidian, who had estates that stretched from Manila to Batangas and after whom Rizal modeled Capitan Tiago for his Noli. Raimunda would marry the bon vivant painter Felipe Baldomero Roxas, half-brother of the famous architect and the scion of another famous family. The elegant couple would take up splendid residence at No. 6 Rue de Babylone in the 7th arrondissement. (It was as chic then as it is now—Yves St Laurent lived on No. 55 and the expensive department store Le Bon Marché is a few blocks away.)
A fragment of an immortal work—sadly incinerated in the Battle of Manila in 1945—is also in the same auction, the study for ‘Filipinas’ in Hidalgo’s ‘Per Pacem et Libertatem (Through Peace and Liberty)’ that scholars believe is the spiritual heir of Juan Luna’s masterpiece ‘España y Filipinas’, which portrays the maiden Philippines being led on a gloriously righteous path by Mother Spain. In Hidalgo’s work, the warrior Filipinas (her head bandaged) offers her unseen sword in surrender to the American goddess Columbia. It, too, was conceived and brought to life in the Hidalgo studio on Boulevard Arago in 1903 as a commission for the now notoriously exploitative St. Louis Exposition a year later. (It comes with the impeccable provenance of Hidalgo’s grand-nephew, from whom Ambeth acquired this marvel.)
In the inexplicably symmetrical way that history and art intersect, Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera—who was Luna’s brother-in-law—and a good friend of not just Hidalgo but also Rizal, also occupies the same space at the León auction with the surviving twin of the seal Andres Bonifacio would use in his last days on earth, just before his trial and death in Maragondon. It was a gift to TH from the Katipunero leader Julio Nakpil who lived his own last days in the house of Ariston Bautista with Bonifacio’s wife, Gregoria de Jesus. It completes a cycle of time-travel begun with a single faded photograph.
