Geronimo Cristobal

Category: Paintings

  • Women Pioneers of Philippine Art

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    In celebration of International Women’s Day, allow me to introduce three pioneering and remarkable women in Philippine Art. By the late 19th century, women began carving their place in formal art education led by the trailblazing Pelagia Mendoza y Gotianquin (1867-1939). Born in Pateros, Mendoza grew up demonstrating exceptional talent in artistic pursuits such as…

  • Lozano’s Letras y Figuras in the FDR Museum for Mapping Philippine Material Culture (SOAS)

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    While researching visual representations of port cities, I encountered an unexpected object at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum: a nineteenth-century letras y figuras painting by the Manila artist José Honorato Lozano (1815/1821–1885). The Roosevelt Library—best known for presidential papers, wartime correspondence, and family memorabilia—is not the first place art historians would think…

  • A Filipino painter you should know: Eduardo Arandia Salgado

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    The following article expands the original posted here: https://libguides.nybg.org/c.php?g=1465030 Eduardo Arandia Salgado (1910–1987) was a Filipino painter and botanical illustrator born in Manila. He studied painting at the University of the Philippines, completing advanced courses between 1931 and 1932 under the direction of Fabian de la Rosa and Fernando Amorsolo. Trained in a classical style,…

  • Antonio Garcia Llamas (1912–1999)

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    Antonio Garcia y Llamas (1912–1999) was a Filipino painter, muralist, and teacher who worked between Manila, Jakarta, and Madrid. Little is written about Garcia but his work aligns with the Philippine academic tradition in twentieth-century Philippine painting. He was born in Manila on 16 May 1912 and received his early education at the Colegio de…

  • Intellectual and Social Currents in the Establishment of the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura (1821–1834) published in Sojourn

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    I’m pleased to announce the publication of my article in Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia: Geronimo Cristobal, “Intellectual and Social Currents in the Establishment of the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura (1821–1834),” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 41, no. 1 (2026): 1–45.https://doi.org/10.1355/sj41-1a The article revisits the origins of the…

  • EXPOLIARIVM: The Expatriate life of Juan Luna’s famous painting

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    In 1884, at the Madrid Exposición General de Bellas Artes, a photograph by Juan Laurent captured Juan Luna’s Spoliarium installed alongside other works exhibited within a cavernous steel and glass hall. The image preserves the exhibitionary context that contributed to consolidating the painting’s public and international reputation. While scanning the Biblioteca Nacional de España’s archive,…

  • Manila Beans in a Medici Recipe Book

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    When I visited Florence over the summer, I was surprised by how many Filipinos I met. Some were priests. Others ran restaurants or worked as artists. Hearing Tagalog in Tuscan streets made me think about older connections between Manila and Europe. I began wondering how Manila was imagined by the rest of the world during…

  • Museum installation focuses on small figures in large landscapes

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    I wrote about staffage in vues d’optique—a genre of etching popular in the second half of the eighteenth century—for a new exhibition at the Johnson Museum. I first encountered these prints during my research fellowship in Leiden and was struck to learn that, around the same time, the Johnson received a donation of a set…

  • The Chapel in the Six Circuits of Hell

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    In his Kapilya installation for Art Fair Philippines, Max Balatbat assembles a makeshift chapel of salvaged wood and rusted rebar. This is supposed to represent the look of faith forged from marginal lives that the art writer Carla Gamalinda has compared to the one studied by Rey Ileto’s Pasyon at Revolution. A pendulum whip swings…

  • Modernist Morophilia

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    Thank you to my colleagues at the Ateneo, especially Charlie Samuya Veric, for making this possible. This lecture on January 19 2026 will be inside Ateneo Katipunan Campus at the NGF Conference Room, located on the ground floor of Horacio De La Costa Hall. During my dissertation research, I came to see how many of…

  • Sikatuna as viewer’s surrogate in Luna’s Pacto de Sangre

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    I reread Filomeno Aguilar’s essay on the pacto de sangre, and it reminded me how often Luna’s painting is still described as a straightforward image of uneven relations between Spaniards and indigenous leaders. Even the encyclopedia article by Santiago Pilar echoes this. That reading treats the canvas as if it were meant to function like…

  • Juan Luna’s French Orientalist Connection

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    For a long time, art historians have speculated about Juan Luna’s larger network of artists in Paris, including the extent to which he moved within the academic orbit of Jean-Léon Gérôme, the towering figure of French Orientalism. Gérôme’s pedagogical influence has often been inferred through stylistic parallels and early biographical testimony, yet documentary anchors have…

  • The afterlives of Rizal’s A orillas del Pasig

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    A orillas del Pasig circulated in late nineteenth-century Manila as music sung in drawing rooms and printed as sheet music. Its most familiar version, A orillas del Pasig: Danza Filipina para Canto y Piano, features lyrics credited to José Rizal and music composed by his Ateneo Municipal classmate Blas Echegoyen. Hardly anyone remembers that the…

  • Coulisse ala Philippine

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    I was reminded of a term I’ve seen before but never fully grasped during an art history lecture by Andrew Moisey on staffage in photography: the coulisse (pronounced koo-LEES). Developed by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin in 17th-century Rome, it refers to the dark “wing” of trees or architecture placed on one side of a…

  • Juan Luna in Japan

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    Juan Luna’s brief but productive stay in Japan in 1896 is not always discussed is scholarship even if the works he produced during those visits forms some of the most visually compelling episodes of his late career. After returning to Manila in 1894, and following a turbulent period amid the growing revolutionary climate, Luna traveled…

  • Mga Bilanggong Birhen (1977), an Amorsolo-Pastoral in Film

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    Mga Bilanggong Birhen (1977) is set on a Visayan hacienda during the early years of American colonial administration. The film follows the Sagrada family—Felipa, Juan, Doña Sagrada, and the daughters Celina and Milagros—within a household that retains social structures established during the late Spanish period. Throughout the film, the architecture of the ancestral home, its…

  • Ang Mutya ng Epiro: Isang Maagímat na Pagbása sa Florante at Laura ni Balagtas at Marca Demonio ni Amorsolo

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    Disyembre 13, 2025, Sabado 3-4 PM Unibersidad ng Pilipinas-Diliman Tatalakayin ng presentasyong ito ang dalawang anyo ng alegorikong substitusyon. Una, ang pagpapalit ng Pilipinas bilang Epiro sa Florante at Laura ni Balagtas. Dito inilalarawan ang isang kalis bilang sandata ng kabutihan at sagisag ng banal na katarungan. Ikalawa, ang Kris Joloano na muling lumitaw sa imahen ni San Miguel Arkanghel sa Noli…

  • Portrait of the Azcárraga Family (c.1827–1830)

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    Retrato de la familia Azcárraga (c.1827–1830) by Juan Arzeo consists of two oil-on-canvas portraits depicting members of the Azcárraga family of Manila. The sitters are José Azcárraga y Ugarte, an Escolta bookseller; his wife María Isidra Palmera y Bersoza, described in period sources as a mestiza de Albay; and their children José Jr. and Pilar.…

  • La Bulaqueña: What We Know About The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Latest Attraction

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    The following notes draw from the wealth of information shared by scholars, collectors, archival researchers, and art history networks following the loan of La Bulaqueña (1895) to the Louvre Abu Dhabi (June 2025). It brings together insights from literature, oral histories, institutional records, and recent findings that have come to light in the wake of…

  • Pearls in Jean Fouquet’s Melun Madonna

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    Painted ca. 1452–58 as the right wing of the Melun Diptych, Madonna and Child Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim by Jean Fouquet constitutes a singular contribution to the visual culture of the French court. Executed in oil on panel, the painting presents a Marian figure suspended between celestial abstraction and courtly specificity. Seated on a…

  • The Queen’s Cosmopolitical Portrait

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    Imagine standing before a grand portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, resplendent in a gown adorned with pearls, her hand resting confidently on a globe. Behind her, two seascapes depict the English navy’s triumph over the Spanish Armada. This is the Armada Portrait, painted around 1588 to commemorate England’s naval victory and to project the queen’s…

  • Goya’s Fight with Cudgels

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    Two men, isolated in a barren landscape, beat each other with heavy sticks. There’s no clear reason, no visible audience, and—crucially—no way out. Their legs vanish below the frame, long assumed to be submerged in mud. Later photographs taken before the painting’s transfer to canvas suggest they may have been standing in tall grass. Either…

  • Felix Hidalgo, Un Rio

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    The enigmatic painter Felix Resureccion Hidalgo captures a river veiled in the quiet of early evening. The viewer’s gaze glides over the water’s surface, mirroring the way our eyes perceive the fading light by fluidly dissolving into darkness. The glow trembles in the foreground, absorbed by the landscape rather than resisted, as if the deepening…

  • Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern

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    Through March 29MoMA, Floor 2, The Paul J. Sachs Galleries The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern offers a long-overdue reconsideration of a figure whose impact on the institution—and on modern art in America—cannot be overstated. Much like the uprooted pine tree that symbolized the Armory Show, Bliss stood…

  • Pasig River (1948) by Miguel Galvez

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    The Pasig River (1948), an oil on canvas by Miguel Galvez, captures two fishing vessels moored along the riverbank—a quiet tableau of industry and resilience. Galvez depicts Filipinos easing back into the rhythms of labor and life, just three years after the devastation of war. The composition feels deliberate and balanced. The two boats, painted…

  • Marca Demonio de las Comparaciones: Die anachronistische Substitution des Kris Joloano in Rizal und Amorsolo

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    Diese Studie untersucht die anachronistische Präsenz des Kris Joloano in José Rizals Noli Me Tangere (1887) und Fernando Amorsolos Marca Demonio, dem Etikett für den Ginebra San Miguel-Likör, das 1917 geschaffen wurde. Aufbauend auf Nagels und Woods Untersuchung von Anachronismen während der Renaissance positioniert die Analyse die neugierige Einfügung eines Kris Joloano als zeitliche Brücke,…

  • Edades and the fabricated history of his Armory Show conversion to Modern Art

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    Nicola Kanmany John’s dissertation has critically examined the narrative surrounding the Filipino artist Victorio Edades’s Armory Show conversion to Modern Art. Edades is often regarded as the “father of Philippine modernism” and Kanmany John’s findings challenges the claim that a Seattle exhibition inspired by the 1913 Armory Show of New York fundamentally shifted Edades’ artistic…

  • Pearl of the Orient: The Philippines in Shell (2007)

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    Cariño, José Maria A., and Sonia P. Ner. Pearl of the Orient: The Philippines in a Shell. Manila: Arts Mundi Philippinae, 2007. In Pearl of the Orient: The Philippines in Shell (2007), co-authors Sonia P. Ner and Jose Maria “Jomari” Cariño bring to light an overlooked medium of 19th-century Philippine art—paintings and carvings on Pinctada…

  • Talking trees

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    The image of Alexander (Iskandar) encountering the wondrous talking tree in the Shahnama is a fascinating blend of myth, prophecy, and fantastical imagery. In this particular folio from the Great Mongol Shahnama, the tree takes on an even more vivid character under the hand of the Ilkhanid artist, who expands on Firdawsi’s original vision with…

  • La Perla de Lucban

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    This portrait, titled La Perla de Lucban (The Pearl of Lucban), is characteristic of the foto-óleo technique, where paint is applied directly onto a black-and-white photograph to bring depth and color to the subject. Created in 1891 by the Filipino artist Fabian de la Rosa, this piece captures Maria Isabel Nepomuceno de Ordoveza, who had…