Carlos Murillo - Women & Children at the Stream by the Bridge next to the Church c 1900 P2439

A really lovely genre painting, proudly flying the flag of Mexicanismo, by Carlos Murillo, the devoted colleague and follower of Jose Maria Jara Peregrina (1866-1939), one of Mexico's foundational artists of the modern day. After centuries of looking to Europe for inspiration, schooled Mexican painters were finally beginning to discover Mexico. It is hard, from the vantage point of today, with the glories of Kahlo and Rivera and Orozco fresh in our minds, to realize what a radical notion this was. And with this particular work we find ourselves back in precisely that moment in time.

A young man on horseback has approached a group of women, with their children, washing clothes and laying them out to dry on the bank. The arrangement is not un-European, it is pastoral, bucolic, but let us look at the clothes, those purple-hued volcanic ranges and the extraordinary vegetation, the painter's avidity for the sharp brightness of red, the fact that the subjects are unmistakably indigenous people, and we realize we are finally in the New World, looking at it through new eyes.

30" x 40" Oil on board. Signed.