Standing woman with a red flower in her hair, in black fabric with red roses and an open cream-fringed shawl

The Lady with the Shawl

Saturnino Herrán, 1914

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What you see

The woman poses full length, head tilted, with a faint smile. Her dark hair holds a red flower, and she wears gold earrings. With her left arm outstretched she opens a large cream shawl with long fringes, which falls on both sides like a pair of wings. Over her body, black fabric embroidered with red roses runs down to a white skirt.

Black, red and cream stand out against a golden ochre background, barely suggested in patches. The fringes are painted in long vertical strokes that seem to fall. Keep an eye out for the embroidery at her chest that recalls peacock feathers, and the hand at the end of her outstretched arm.

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