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PROPERTY FROM THE ALEX FRIEDER COLLECTION Marikina signed, dated and titled "Marikina, 1933" (lower left) oil on canvas 13" x 18" (33 cm x 46 cm) PROVENANCE Acquired directly from the artist by Alex Frieder, who persuaded President Manuel Quezon to create a safe haven for Jews fleeing the Holocaust in Europe. The result was the establishment of the Jewish Refugee Committee of the Philippine Islands in the late 1930s, which was responsible for saving the lives of more than a thousand Jews from Germany and Austria. Private collection, USA Pre-war Marikina was a painter's haven, where the rugged mountains of Rizal Province seemed to act as guardians of the town's verdant rice fields and the immaculate waters of the Marikina River serving as its lifeblood. In fact, the Marikina countryside was a favorite painting spot for artists during the early decades of the 20th century, a utopia for painters seeking to escape rapidly modernizing American Manila and to draw creative inspiration as they imbibe the fresh, tranquilizing countryside air. This predisposition for the countryside also came at a time when genre painting became the barometer of Philippine painting, as exemplified and spearheaded by Fabian de la Rosa and stimulated by the building of a Filipino national identity anchored to the nostalgia for the traditional and the pastoral, a reaction to the brisk Americanization brought by US colonial rule. Situated at the foothills of the mighty Sierra Madre, Marikina once possessed fertile lands suitable for rice farming and cultivation, with the once-pristine Marikina River running through the town's heart. While the shoemaking industry had already begun to flourish, soon earning the town its moniker of "Shoe Capital of the Philippines," Marikina was still primarily an agricultural settlement, dotted by paddy fields and trailed by carabaos used for plowing. Fernando Amorsolo, the greatest painter of his time, was one of those painters who became enamored with Marikina's charm, so much so that he would regularly sojourn to its environs and paint on the spot. Amorsolo may have first learned of the beauty of Marikina through his uncle, Fabian de la Rosa, who was his first art teacher and an avid Marikina frequenter during the pre-war era, producing several works now in display in major museums, including Mariquina Valley (undated, oil on plywood, UP Vargas Museum Collection) and Mariquina Road (undated, oil on canvas, The National Museum). In an interview with Neal Cruz for The Insurance Line in 1960, Amorsolo reminisced on his prime years, recounting his habitual trips to the countryside, where he and his fellow artist-friends would bring out their brushes and small canvases and paint the lush lands of the Marikina Valley. "My companions in those days were [Irineo] Miranda, [Dominador] Castañeda, [Jose] Pereira, and [Isidro] Ancheta," Amorsolo recalled. "We used to go to Teresa, Montalban, and Marikina. We would be out for days. When we were tired of painting, we would put down our brushes, take our guns, and go shooting birds." This petite 1933 oil painting was one of those works Amorsolo conceived in one of his Marikina excursions. The work possesses the exuberance of his plein air paintings, as evidenced by its small dimensions, the quick, thickly applied brushstrokes, the purity of the colors, and Amorsolo's dynamic composition, which captures an uncontrived snapshot of the moment. Amorsolo's loose rendering of the human figure and the carabao, and the white dabs of paint applied liberally, which represent the patches of water reflecting off the rays of the midday sun, exude the maestro's spur-of-the-moment practice vis-à-vis his more refined studio works. For Amorsolo, his countryside excursions and open-air painting sessions gave him a genuinely liberating feeling, a much-needed respite from his long line of commissions that always catered to his clients' desires. It was also a breather from his bureaucratic responsibilities as instructor of both landscape painting and drawing from life classes at the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts. As Amorsolo confided in a 1929 interview for The Independent and articulated in writing by Ralph W. Hawkins, "When painting a portrait, he explained, he is bound by the taste of the subject…. He feels stifled, fettered. In painting nature studies, his fetters are cut loose, and he paints in absolute freedom of spirit. And that is how he wants to paint." Amorsolo is buried at the Loyola Memorial Park in Marikina, in the same place he once cherished in his lifetime. The maestro lies in repose on a site he personally chose, a spot overlooking the beautiful Manila sunset. Thus, the work then becomes a memento of a maestro communing in perpetuity with the land whose bucolic past he immortalized in canvas. (Adrian Maranan)