TRAVEL, AUCTIONS, AND THE PARISIAN LIFE

chasing heroes

- LISA GUERRERO NAKPIL

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 Leon 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.