Juan Luna's The Parisian Life

                   Oil on Canvas, 1892. Juan Luna's The Parisian Life. The image of the French courtesan when reversed has a "geographical likeness" to the mirror-image of the archipelago of the Philippines or it shows the map of the Philippines. The woman has a dark neck and was placed with her head in a window joint resulting to having the effect of a sort of "antenna jutting out" of the head. The dark neck and the window joint line showed that as if the woman was being strangled, conveying the message that the Philippines was under stress.

The Parisian Life is regarded as the last major work Luna did during his post-academic and life in Paris This period in Luna’s career in painting is known as the post-academic or the Parisian period, a time when his style moved away from having “dark colors of the academic palette” and became “increasingly lighter in color and mood”.

             A blogger wrote :  " everything else in the painting  was pointing towards the lady—the attention of two of the three men , the triangulation of the newspaper, the orientation  of the table and chairs, and the brim of the top hat and the corner of a man’s overcoat lying beside the lady. Luna was actually drawing attention to the lady—the motherland—and was quietly asserting the need to acknowledge that its relationship with Spain—its lover, its colonizer—had a degree of abuse and malicious intent, as suggested by the half-drunk mug of beer on the lady’s side of the table and the still-full mug on the lover’s side of the table. Even the newspaper behind the lady’s head, with its name translated into The Cry of Bastille, the French Revolution of a century before, points toward the planning of the Philippines Revolution"