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“We’d rather not say anything negative about the artwork,” Rose tells me in Filipino, the day we visit the painting at the museum. “We just want the visitor to appreciate it.”
Which is not entirely difficult. Inherently a beauty, a standout among its two immediate neighbors—beside it hang a couple of rather dreary portraits of Parisian ladies of the night—it's a vessel of brightness that draws the eyes in, in the all-green Luna and Hidalgo room at the museum’s first floor. Portrait of a Lady is a dreamy, Impressionist rendering of a woman lounging in bed, surrounded by the softest white sheets and awash in a kind of beatific light. The brushstrokes are tender, almost delicate, enhancing the innocence in her expression.
But when you look closer, she seems to be posing after a sexual interlude, her skin flush pink, her frothy night dress appearing to have slipped off a little, revealing her supple right breast. “It’s a very Victorian concept,” says the art historian Ramon Villegas of the work which is said to have been completed in Paris in 1890, “that contrast of seductiveness and the symbol of devotion (rosary), a secret life with public piety.”
The curious thing, however, is that the lady in the portrait doesn’t look at all like Luna’s wife who in photographs appears to have a skin color closer to brown than pearly white, with a countenance one is tempted to call almost masculine. While some say the lady is Luna’s favourite model, a Caucasian named Angela Duche, some art historians propose that the woman in the painting is Luna’s idealized vision of his Spanish-Filipino mestiza wife, and the portrait itself is a loving depiction of their sexual, if not marital, bliss.
So how can one painting that embodied a husband’s reverence and love for his wife end up being only a bearer of gloom and doom? And how did it happen that the love and bliss in the marriage bed quickly turned into jealousy and hate, consequently ending in tragedy, with the painter Juan Luna shooting his wife Paz in their home in September 23, 1892, some two years after the painting was made?
