School of Félix Resurrección Hidalgo: After Hidalgo, El Pescador de Sucag

School of Félix Resurrección Hidalgo (1855 - 1913
After Hidalgo, El Pescador de Sucag

dated 1886 (lower right)
oil on canvas
26” x 44” (66 cm x 112 cm)

Opening bid: PHP 1,600,000

Provenance: Private Collection, Bilbao, Spain

Félix Resurrección Hidalgo would be one of those youth that led a charmed life. His mother’s side of the family were the Padillas, the extremely wealthy propertyowners of Binondo. Social historian Augusto M.R. Gonzalez would recount in his knowledgeable blog “Remembrance of Things Awry” that Hidalgo was furthermore a bit of child prodigy. “For starters,” Gonzalez notes, “he is recorded to have painted at the age of four in 1859. His maternal grandfather Narciso Padilla was himself immortalized by the Tondo maestro Antonio Malantic. Narciso was a rich lawyer and merchant with several businesses and many commercial real estate properties in Manila and surrounding “arrabales” or districts. Narciso’s daughter, Barbara “Baritay” Padilla de Resurreccion Hidalgo, Felix’s mother, inherited many valuable properties from him, among them several big warehouses in the Divisoria entrepot in Tondo which lined the Pasig river. The affluent Padilla family had [ and still has ] a long history distinguished by high professional achievement, wealth, conservatism, and prudence. The Padilla descendants recall that, with characteristic frugality, their forebears had transferred the “bahay na bato” ancestral house in Lingayen, Pangasinan beam by beam and brick by brick to Calle General Solano in posh San Miguel district, Manila in the late 1800s.” Hidalgo was allowed to enroll in the Manila Academia only on condition that he would continue his formal college education. He never graduated with the degree in law that his family wanted but he did received one in philosophy. In 1876, he would be selected among the favored few of the Academia to enter his works at the Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia, a world’s fair to mark the 100th anniversary of the signing of the United States’ Declaration of Independence. It was a singular honor for such a young man. (Simon Flores, 15 years his senior, was one of the other artists known to have been selected.) Before being sent abroad for display, they were first exhibited to no doubt an adoring crowd at the Teatro Circo de Bilibid. Only a very few of these paintings from Hidalgo’s “Philippine period” are known to exist, secreted away in private collections in this country as well as in public holdings in Madrid, rarely if ever exhibited, such as those in the Prado, Spain’s national museum. The work at hand is a verdant scene, the bamboo thickets and azure sky reflected in the limpid waters of what one presumes is the only river the young Hidalgo was familiar with, the Rio Pasig. A sinewy fisherman wields a net that trails in the deep blue waters, a young lad tends to the catch held in a couple of baskets. The fisherman’s wife dressed in the red (kundiman) cloth of the Filipino peasant, raises her arms, as if pushing gently with an oar hidden from view by her wide sleeves. A light mist the soft sunlight hints that it is just at the break of dawn. The following year after this first tour de force, Hidalgo would be included in the roster of artists for the de luxe edition of Fr. Manuel Blanco’s Flora de Filipinas. In the words of scholar P.R. Santiago, it featured a “who’s who of Philippine art at the time.” Hidalgo was eventually named second prize for the best cover artwork. (His teacher Sáez took the first prize, although that hardly seemed fair since Sáez was not only the director of the Manila Academia but was also on the board of judges.) All these achievements would only add to his mantle of glamor and in 1879, he would be named a scholar to the much vaunted Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. It is easy to imagine how the affection and adulation for Hidalgo’s fame and honor would have generated a series of works by students at the Academia. Their main course of education—as with all European art schools—was the copying of works of the masters. (Lisa Guerrero Nakpil)

Lot 139 of the Leon Gallery auction on 28 November 2020. Please see leon-gallery.com/auctions/The-Kingly-Treasures-Auction-2020 for more details.

Taken on: November 19, 2020

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