Fabián de la Rosa

Biography

Among the works that Fabián de la Rosa sent in 1904 to the international exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, were two: “Transplanting Rice” and “The Death of General Lawton”. The first won a gold award, the second a bronze.

He was born on 5 May 1869 in Paco, then a suburb of Manila, to Marcos de la Rosa and Gorgonia (by other accounts, Gregoria) Cueto. It was a family of artists: his aunt Marciana de la Rosa taught him to draw landscapes and portraits when he was ten, and his uncle Simón Flores y de la Rosa, a well-known nineteenth-century painter of portraits and church interiors, took him on as an apprentice. He is said to have learned to draw before he learned to write. Spanish was his mother tongue and the main language of his youth: the country was then part of Spain. In 1881, at twelve, he enrolled at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios, the school of arts and trades in Manila. Three years later his father died, and he had to leave school to help support the family. In this break he painted the first work known to be his, a portrait of a woman, “La Perla de Lucban”; it is dated sometimes to this period, sometimes to 1891. In 1893, at twenty-four, he returned to study at the Escuela Superior de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado, the higher school of painting, sculpture and engraving, where his teachers were Lorenzo Guerrero and Miguel Zaragoza. In 1898 he won a competition for a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. The Philippine Revolution took that journey away from him.

He first went to Europe only at thirty-nine. In 1908, as a pensionado (scholarship holder) of the Germinal cigar factory, he left for Paris and studied at the Académie Julian. A work dated 1909, “Un recuerdo de la Villa Borghese” (“A Remembrance of the Villa Borghese”), belongs to the same time.

On his return he became one of the first instructors at the School of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines; the school grew out of that same higher school and was one of the three units that founded the university in 1908. From 1927 to 1937 he was its director, and, according to some accounts, the first native Filipino in that post. Among his pupils were his nephews Fernando and Pablo Amorsolo; Fernando was later named a National Artist of the Philippines. In 1928 he went to Europe again with his wife, Gorgonia Tolentino. He worked for four months in Paris, visited Munich, Geneva and Rome, and in Madrid showed his work at the Ateneo.

In all, he is estimated to have painted about a thousand works. The art writer Aurelio S. Alvero divided them into three periods: academic, with little attention to atmosphere; academic, with the surroundings now perceptible; and a late period in which colour becomes the main concern. His mature works include “Planting Rice” (1921, Malacañan Palace), “Women Working in a Rice Field”, the watercolour “Los Baños” (1922), “Landscape with Dark Trees” and “Pasay Beach” (1927), “Young Filipina” (1928) and “El kundiman” (1930). To my mind the titles show how genre scenes gradually give way to landscape in his work.

De la Rosa died on 14 December 1937 in Manila. In 1968 the city authorities posthumously awarded him the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan (“Guide of the Arts and Culture”), and in 2007 a retrospective of his work was held at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum of the University of the Philippines in Quezon City.