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Juan Luna was an ambitious artist with a great talent to back up his ambition. He was also very termperamental and could get quite violent. When he was drawn to Paris after Madrid, it was there that he met his wife Paz who he would marry in 1886, and kill in 1892.
In Paris during the belle époque years, they were the picture of an It Couple, Juan and Paz. She was the prized daughter of a very tight-knit, very wealthy political family in self-exile from the Philippines; the Pardo de Taveras, Filipinos of Spanish nobility, fled to Europe to escape—according to Raquel Reyes’s book Love, Passion and Patriotism—the possibility of persecution from the anti-reform Spaniards.
“Paz had grown up in Paris, she was not the typical Maria Clara. In Paris, you’re not going to look like you came straight out of a convent,” says Mara Pardo de Tavera, daughter of former social services department secretary Mita Pardo de Tavera who is a granddaughter of Trinidad, the brother of Paz. Owing to having lived abroad, Paz was cosmopolitan, sophisticated, spoke French and English and, as Jose Rizal once observed, was “very amiable, and also very Filipino. She dresses with much elegance…” Juan, for his part, was a terribly ambitious young man, and possessed with a great talent to back his ambition. Before he moved to Paris from Madrid where he continued his art studies, he had already won great recognition from the Exposicion Nacional de Belles Artes, a gold medal for a mammoth work entitled Spoliarium, for which he would also win a prize in France—another gold, this time from the Societe des Artistes Francais. He was a promising young painter who moved with the cool crowd of Filipino artists and intellectuals, among them Rizal, and Paz’s two brothers, Trinidad and Felix, through whom Paz and Juan would meet.
While Paz’s mother, Doña Juliana Gorricho, thought Juan and her daughter a bad match, she would be convinced by her son Trinidad that his friend was “not a vulgar native” and with his great talent and education would make a fine husband for Paz. The 29-year old Juan would marry the 21-year old Paz in September of 1886, and the two would honeymoon in Venice and Rome. In September of the following year, Paz would give birth to their first child Andres, lovingly nicknamed Luling, who his father doted on and made the subject of many portraits. After Paz suffered a miscarriage, and having realized the difficulty of financially supporting a family with the erratic earnings of an artist, Luna was forced to move with his new family to a new address, the 26 Villa Dupont, 48 Rue Pergolese in Paris. There, Paz’s protective mother Juliana would live with the couple, not only to watch over her daughter and grandson, but also to practically finance the entire household, including the studies of Antonio, Juan’s brother, who for a time was a house guest.
