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"
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