Arcadópolis
The Jarabe
Saturnino Herrán, 1913
What you see
A woman dances at the center, head thrown back in a broad smile. She wears a white blouse, a red rebozo over her shoulder and a patterned pink skirt that she gathers in one hand. On the left, a mustached man in a dark vest leans toward her. A hat lies on the ground at lower left, and a guitar peeks in on the right.
The pinks and reds of the skirt and rebozo dominate the canvas against the man's darker tones. Behind them opens a landscape of reddish rooftops and hills under a pale sky. Notice the woman's bare foot near the bottom edge and the blue and red fringe of her rebozo.
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.
More by Saturnino Herrán
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