Gallery 1, January 23, 2025 – April 2025

Curator: Marcus Burke, Senior curator emeritus at the HSM&L

In the first decades of South American Independence, as the new republics sought to find their own national identities, artists also found new forms of popular art to depict the emerging societies around them. From the 1820s into the 1850s, Francisco Fierro Palas, called “Pancho” Fierro (1807/1809-1879) painted watercolor images of the citizens and customs of his native Lima, Peru. In doing so, Fierro, along with his teacher, Francisco Javier Cortés (1775-1839), established the costumbrista school of Latin American painting, bringing the vivid life of nineteenth-century Limeños, their costumes and their occupations, to an international audience stretching from Europe and the United States to Canton in China. What is more, Fierro’s own life story as an Afro-Hispanic is an example of the new opportunities for people of talent of all races and ethnic types.

This exhibition brings together a selection from the hundreds of works by Fierro and his followers in the Hispanic Society’s collection. Combining the European “cries of the street” illustrations of occupations going back to the late Renaissance with the “Castas” (racial mixtures) tradition developed in Mexico in the early 1700s (Juan Rodríguez Juárez, De Mestizo y de India Produce Coyote, 1715; Hispanic Society LA2122), Fierro uses a robust, psychologically direct manner to convey the lively personalities of his subjects. His images include street vendors, upper-class ladies and gentlemen, soldiers, monks and nuns, beggars, women veiled with one eye showing (“tapadas”), pilgrimages into the countryside, native Peruvians from Andean villages, French school teachers, and all sorts of characters found on the streets of Lima.

Significant collections of Peruvian costumbrista watercolors were taken to France, England, Germany, and the United States as well as to Manila in the Philippines and Canton in China. All kinds of trans-Pacific commerce increased markedly in the 1800s, with Lima and its port, Callao, becoming important stopping places for whaling, commercial, passenger, and military vessels. (One group of watercolors in the Hispanic Society’s collection was acquired by an American Naval Lieutenant at Lima in 1847, another by a French diplomat/merchant around 1832.) The resulting market for popular images meant that Fierro was widely copied and imitated in his lifetime, including in Canton from around 1830. Copies and imitations are also found in Argentina and other South American countries in both watercolor and lithography.

All of these elements come together in one of Fierro’s surviving monumental works: the scroll depicting a Holy Week Procession on the Calle de San Agustín, Lima, of ca. 1832 (Hispanic Society A1585). At 17½ inches high x  15½ feet long (44.4 x 475 cm), the scroll offers a panoramic, almost cinematic, view of the parade leaving the Church of San Agustín on a Good Friday in the early Republican era. A series of businesses – hat and shoe stores, pawn shops, an inn and restaurants, a beer brewery – provides the backdrop not only for the pasos, or processional floats, with full-sized figures depicting the story of Christ’s passion but also for the teeming life of Lima and its wide variety of citizens. The confraternity sponsoring the procession was important to Fierro, since it was a traditionally Afro-Hispanic group, in which we may assume Fierro played an increasingly prominent role throughout his career as a successful artist and businessman.

This exhibition will also celebrate Hispanic Society founder Archer Huntington’s intellectual curiosity and curatorial vision that led him to collect 19th century costumbrista works on paper by Fierro and others.  Of the several thousand works extant today attributed to Fierro and his circle, the Hispanic Society has the largest single collection, numbering nearly 500 works. The exhibition also features works recently analyzed by scientists from Nottingham Trent University in England as part of an international humanities-led scientific study jointly sponsored by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council and the United States National Endowment for the Humanities.

This exhibition and the private exhibition opening are made possible by generous support from the Consulate General of Peru in New York.