Magbabanig
signed (lower right)
oil on canvas
26” x 19” (66 cm x 48 cm)

Provenance:
Estate of the artist

This piece is accompanied by a certificate issued by Mr. Jose Pineda confirming the authenticity of this lot

As a painter, the forte of Jorge Pineda was genre. At the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, while still a “student”, his Buyo Chewers (Last Buyeras) won a bronze medal. This picture must have struck the Norte Americanos who saw it, as a colorful bit of curio among the entries of the more urbane Luna, Hidalgo and De la Rosa — all of which won gold and silver medals. As a painter, he was a peer to Fernando Amorsolo, but less prolific. Yet, he explored subjects outside those of the Amorsolo School.

Pineda emulated Don Fabian de la Rosa at one point. Yet, their difference is that when Don Fabian depicted people from the lower classes, the result had an aristocratic detachment from them. Pineda was more at ease with these people — he was with them. As a resident cartoonist in the prewar Philippines Free Press, Pineda illustrated the image of the symbolic Filipino everyman character Juan de la Cruz wearing a barong, a native salakot, and tsinelas

Among his finest portrayals are of the Filipino at work and play, particularly those he did when he was well into the middle age. Unlike Amorsolo, who all his life found beauty only in the young, Pineda saw it in the mature faces of the elderly and painted it with a middle-aged artist’s understanding of the inner strengths and virtues shaped by many years of experience.

This painting is a study of ruggedness softened by an insight ni to the interior that is calm and confident, while the late monr ing or afternoon light shines with a contrasting sharpness. Like his “Last Buyeras”, the scene takes place in the interiors of a rural house

The woman’s aging face gently glows in the reflected golden light cast by the window. The rest of the reflected natural light is cast by the sprawling “banig” she is working on.

By her side are brightly colored banig bunched together as if to say that no simple way of vliing should stop one from being personally couth and tidy. “What one is made to see is more than a careful balancing of bright and shadowy areas and positive/negative spaces, but a fairly eloquent statement of a life-style of making do.

The compact, meticulous rendering of Filipinos at work and at play disclosed an image of a gentle, sensible and glowingly industrious people designed to make every Filipino proud to identify with. And this was just the image needed to bolster the pro-independence, anti-U.S. editorial policies of the La Renacimiento, another publication where he worked in the years before the First World War. And since, Pineda himself hasaccurately repeated certain themes, such as “Sungkaan” — who knows if the idea has occurred to the Nationalist in him to repeat the “Magbabanig” but this time, weaving a sprawling national flag?