(Still Life) / 1884 / Oil on canvas / 58 x 79 centimetres / Artist: Paz Paterno / Private collection

Paz Paterno (1867-1914) painted this piece at the age of 17. It is a combination of two subjects—a bodegon (still life) and a paisaje (landscape)—and is perhaps her best-known work. The right side of the image is dominated by Philippine fruits and nuts in full splendor—lanzones, atis, makopa, bananas, mabolo, cashew, pili, and coconuts. They are all piled against the lower trunk of a large tree, whose flowers and leaves accentuate the fruits. It is a feast for the eyes. Instead of placing the fruits atop a table, as in conventional still life paintings, Paterno chose to situate her still life in the outdoors.

Paz used vibrant and aggressive hues in this work. The reds and yellows are made intense in an effort to depict the fruits as fully ripe but fresh. None of these are rotting or blemished. The size of the fruits is exaggerated, magnified, and shown in almost extreme close-up, threatening to jut out of the pictorial space. The fruits, however, look artificial, because of their idealized depiction. Even if the entire scene is in the “natural” setting of a garden, the scene still looks staged. The space is crowded with visual elements that are made to fit in a confined and narrow pictorial plane.

The right side of the composition is heavier, because most of the fruits are grouped here. On the left half is the landscape. The entire garden is in the dark, but some light seems to come from a corner of the garden. There is just enough light for the details of the fruits to be seen. There is contrast in the clarity of the details of the fruits, butterfly, and plants on the painting’s right half, and the hazy figures found in the background landscape. The composition is not static, but suggestive of movement, particularly in the flight of the butterfly and the division of the canvas into diagonal halves. Some fruits are even shown straying away from the main branch, but their movement appears contrived.

This is supposed to be a combination of paisaje and bodegon but the paisaje is hardly discernible in the background; the mountains and a boating figure are not sharp. The landscape is hardly expansive and is overshadowed and contained by the artist’s private garden space, from where she presumably painted the scene. The impression is one of narrowness and confinement; the site comes across as dark, protected, and concealed. Despite the fact that the space depicted in the painting is an exterior space, the painting leaves a stronger impression of an interior, private space.

In combining two genres that were available to her and other women artists of the 19th century, Paterno showed a predisposition toward experimentation. In the process, she challenged the hierarchy of themes in the visual arts—a hierarchy in which bodegones and paisajes were devalued while historical and religious paintings were privileged. This is the oldest extant painting by a woman visual artist in the Philippines.