The Lopez Family of Iloilo, through the Lopez Museum and Library and the Lopez Group Foundation, has brought the works of Juan Luna, Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo, Fernando Amorsolo, and Juan Arellano to form a hometown exhibition, Patrimony of All: Ang Panublion sang Tanan.

Mounted at the main hall of the University of the Philippines Visayas Museum of Art and Cultural Heritage are 16 masterpieces appraised as national treasures with paintings dating as far back as 1855, that by Juan Luna, and the latest, 1960, by Juan Arellano.

The sheer age of the paintings, at 170 and 65 years old, respectively, not only shows the fragility of the artworks and the extensiveness of the Lopez Family collection, but their vision to inspire national pride and deep love for the Philippines.

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Since its opening in November 26, 2024, throngs of people from different walks of life have come to view the works on a daily basis, with students from the different schools within and outside the region, scholars and art aficionados, dignitaries from the government, private, and non-profit sectors, members of the diplomatic corps, and foreign and domestic tourist to Iloilo City.

The Patrimony of All is a six-month exhibition and it will be on show until April this year.

Lopez homecoming

The Lopez Family regards the exhibition as a homecoming and scions from both Fernando Lopez and Eugenio Lopez attended the unveiling led by Mercedes “Cedie” Lopez-Vargas, president of the Lopez Group Foundation and executive director of the Lopez Museum and Library.

“This endeavor reminds us of the words of Oscar Lopez who said “we have never lost our affection to the city of our childhood,” said Lopez-Vargas.

“Iloilo holds a nostalgic and familial significance to the Lopez family. It is here in Iloilo that our family’s journey of hard work, philanthropy, and service to others began. It just makes perfect sense to keep coming back, and giving back, and uplifting the very community that also shaped our personal history,” she expressed.

Lopez-Vargas adds: “The family shared the collection to our hometown as part of a continuing process of investing in the soft power of human development. So we take every opportunity to participate in the development of the city and province of Iloilo.” 

Survey of works

The eminent art curator Dr. Patrick Flores described the collection as “a survey of works of Philippine masters from the late nineteenth to the early part of the twentieth century, showing paintings that depict what the artists “saw and felt around them” and “conversed with what was being imagined elsewhere in the world.”

The exhibition title brings the audience to the significant moment when Dr. Jose Rizal led revolutionary compatriots to a toast for Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo, after winning gold and silver medals, respectively, in the National Exposition of the Fine Arts in Madrid in 1884.

Rizal declared: “Luna and Hidalgo are the pride of Spain as of the Philippines-though born in the Philippines, they might have been born in Spain, for genius has no country; genius bursts forth everywhere; genius is like light and air, the patrimony of all: cosmopolitan as space, as life and God.”

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The collection show styles around “Academic Realism and Impressionism, layered through their distinct visions of colonial allegory, the native sunlight, and the dreamwork of the primeval and the future; themes that discuss how the medium of Western-style painting played out in the Philippines and how the artists invested it with local material and sentiment. This locality was at once rooted and worldly.”

“In this rhythm between survey and theme, a Philippine context begins to take shape and finally figure. This context is ecological, historical, and cultural but is rendered decisively artistic. To a great extent, this story is also the story of the modern, how art and artists critically reflect on the social atmosphere and craft the complex visual language animating a broadly conceived Philippine sensibility,” Dr. Flores underscored.

Dream and Daily Life by Luna

Soliciting high interest among guests were works of Juan Luna, which include La Moza y El Lego (c. 1890), Fantasia(1890), and Street Flower Vendors (c. 1855), a historical tidbit said to show Parisian women selling flowers during the funeral day of the popular French novelist Victor Hugo, who wrote Les Miserables.

A piece that wooed viewers was Ensueños de Amor (Dreams of Love, undated) with many pointing a finger to the painting as an intriguing portrait by Luna’s of his wife, Paz Pardo de Tavera, on bed during their honeymoon in Venice.

“This suggestive, sensual (some would say erotic) image of the wife asleep has launched a thousand interpretations. Not many people know that the second painting is hidden on the back of “Ensueños.” A Roman maiden that was either a study of a figure from Luna’s “Hymen, oh Hyménée!” or “Roman Wedding” circa 1886-1887 or “España y Filipinas” circa 1890,” wrote historian Ambeth R. Ocampo (Treasures in Iloilo, PDI, December 4, 2024). 

In 1892, years of tension between Luna and his wife burst in an argument that ended with Luna fatally shooting her and his mother-in-law. After his acquittal by a French court, he and his son left for Spain, and there moved around for a while before departing for the Philippines in 1894.

Two years after or in August 1896, Luna, together with his brothers, was arrested by Spanish forces for alleged complicity in the mass rebellion of the Katipunan. They were all eventually released. Luna was later appointed as a diplomatic agent to France of the Philippine junta exiled in Hong Kong and, thereafter, a member of a diplomatic mission to Washington in the United States of America, to advocate for recognition of the Philippine government.

Myth and History by Hidalgo

A crowd favorite was the collection of studies by Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo, especially the El Asesinato de Gobernador Bustamante y su Hilo (The Assassination of Gov. Bustamante, c. 1900) and La Barca de Aqueronte (Boat to Hades, 1887).

The works sheds light on Hidalgo’s political reticence which can be understood as harboring anticlerical sentiment. The works were not publicly exhibited in Spain or the Philippines during his lifetime, despite being included in the Philippine exhibition at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri in the United States.

It has been claimed that this work marks a significant shift in the artist’s academic style towards a flatter surface and more vibrant, transparent colors, which he might have achieved using an oil-free paint formula and an application technique that he had evolved himself.

Also on display are Per Pacem et Libertatem (c.1903) La Derrida de Limahong (c. 1903).  

Kin in Place by Amorsolo

The viewers also came face-to-face with the works of Fernando Amorsolo, the first to be recognized as a National Artist and known as the “Grand Old Man of Philippine Art.”

The Amorsolo collection was highly-recognizable because of the signature Philippine rural landscapes, seascapes and the daily life of Filipinos.

It shows works from the 1930’s to 1950’s using oil on canvas, on board, and on wood – Native Fruits (1937), Musical Duo (1937), Mag-Lolo (1943), Atardecer (1944), and Woman with Mangoes (1951) with some speculating and joking that if only Amorsolo was alive today, he could have enjoyed Guimaras mangoes and painted it as well.

Amorsolo, whose style has been described as academic, with impressionist influences, is credited with having captured the particular quality of Philippine sunlight. His idealized portrayals of everyday rural life gained early renown among officials of the American colonial government and American visitors to the Philippines, as well as Filipino art patrons. An important work in this respect is Planting Rice (1922), which went on to become one of the most popular images of the Commonwealth period, appearing in calendars, posters, and tourist brochures, as did many of his other pictures of quotidian routine.

His historical canvases were similarly widely reproduced in textbooks and other materials. Moreover, the elite avidly commissioned him to do their portraits.

Amorsolo toiled at his easel up to the final months of his life. He died April 24, 1972. 

In Light of Country by Arellano

Many were surprised that Juan Arellano was also a painter as revealed by his profile. But those who knew him considered the exhibition as a homecoming of Arellano for the restored UP Visayas Museum of Art and Cultural Heritage was his architectural masterpiece, and completed by the sculptural decorations and grill works of the famous Italian sculptor Francesco Monti, together with local artisans.

Many of Arellano’s works suggest the currents of impressionism and fauvism. The critic Alice Guillermo says that where human figures are present in his landscapes, they become part of the drama of nature.Three of his works in the collection shows this style, The Philippine Scenes I and II (c. 1920) and Christ Down from the Cross (1960).

In view of the characteristics of his painting – notably, his landscapes in the impressionist style and also religious scenes – Arellano had arguably been practicing modernism at least as early as 1913, more than a decade before Victorio Edades, himself trained in architecture, had his 1928 one-person exhibition, which served as a decisive moment for modernism in the Philippines.

Arellano took up painting lessons after office hours, being a draftsmen at the Bureau of Lands. He left home for the United States in 1907 and found a job at a Philadelphia museum, where his work as a photo colorist prompted his employer to sponsor Arellano’s education at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Later, the United States government offered Arellano a scholarship for architecture and he was enrolled at the Architectural School of the Drexel Institute and trained under the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects in New York. He worked in New York before taking a postgraduate course at the University of Pennsylvania.

Arellano returned to Manila in 1913, engaging in private practice before joining the Bureau of Public Works in 1917, where he rose through the ranks, and played a key role in the development of Philippine architecture in the early 20th century, turning from neoclassicism to art deco to orientalism in his designs for edifices like the Post Office and the Metropolitan Theater in Manila, the main building of the University of the Philippines Visayas, and other significant and now heritage structures in lloilo City, among others.  

The Ilonggo essence 

The Patrimony of All also revealed what Dr. Patrick Flores describes as the “Ilonggo essence” because of the coming together of notable Ilonggo champions for arts development, foremost among them are former Senator Franklin M. Drilon and then Senator Loren B. Legarda, Iloilo City Mayor Jerry P. Treñas and Mrs. Rosalie S. Treñas, former Tourism Secretary Narzalina Z. Lim, and the Lopez Family.

Dr. Flores himself declared his Ilonggo roots, saying, “It is quite an honor to curate an exhibition in my alma mater, UP, in a building that is designed by Arellano himself, and for the audience of my hometown, providing them a rare opportunity to experience and encounter, firsthand and up close, the works of the Philippine masters,” he expressed. 

The Lopez Museum and Library deemed the homecoming exhibition as a significant cultural endeavor, having to loan a portion of its collection for the first time in the Philippines, and outside Manila, since its establishment in 1960.

The project was 5-years in the making conceived by former Senator Drilon in 2019 and with major funding support by Senator Legarda. It was realized through a tripartite agreement between the Lopez Group Foundation, UP Visayas, and the Iloilo City Government.