Two blind old men, one with head tilted back and hands on a cane, before the great dome of a church

The Blind

Saturnino Herrán, 1914

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What you see

The heads of two old men fill the lower half of this tall, narrow picture. The upper one tips his head back, eyes rolled white and mouth half open, his gnarled hands folded over a cane. The lower one, bald and with closed eyes, rests his face on one hand. Behind them rise an enormous dome and a yellow cloud.

The scene is bathed in golden yellows and greens, with intense reds in the skin. Wrinkles, beard and hands are built from short, crosshatched strokes that look like colored pencil or pastel. Look at the hands on the cane, as expressive as the faces, and the inscription at upper left.

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