Stooped old man with a gray beard and striped serape, holding a palm hat in one hand, the other wrapped in a white rag

The Beggar

Saturnino Herrán, 1914

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What you see

An old man stands slightly stooped, looking straight at us. His face is weathered and ruddy, with a gray beard and close-cropped hair. A serape striped in gray and black falls from one shoulder over a brown blanket. One hand holds a palm hat and the knob of a cane; the other, wrapped in a white rag, rests at his waist.

Herrán paints in broad planes of color with firm outlines: the bluish grays of the serape, the ochre blanket and an olive-green background that darkens toward the right. Light falls on the face and hands. Notice the cloth-wrapped feet and the signature at upper right.

About Saturnino Herrán

Saturnino Herrán was born in Aguascalientes in 1887 and trained at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, studying drawing with the Catalan painter Antonio Fabrés and colour with Germán Gedovius. He turned scenes of everyday Mexican life into symbolic images of identity, and his painting “The Offering” (1913) is a classic example of Mexican modernism. He died in 1918, aged only 31, while working on “Our Gods”, a triptych commissioned for the Palace of Fine Arts, and his work became a model for the muralists of the following decades.

All 12 works by Saturnino Herrán