It was only a painting, a medium-sized framed canvas that hung in the living room of my grandparents’ house, in Oklahoma City. But to my child mind it was mysteriously alive, a scene and setting that felt not just depicted but real. I didn’t so much look at the painting as visit it, taking my place in the stillness of a foreign glade, where a young woman in a yellow headscarf sat forever unmoving on a rustic log table.
She was about to smile, it seemed, as she contemplated a pear she held gracefully in her right hand. Near her were three less distinct figures, seated or standing around baskets and piles of fruit. The deep shade, broken by swaths of sunlight, was protective and beckoning. When I stared at that painting, I felt that I had entered a soothing tableau of timelessness.
But in the world outside the frame, time pressed on. My grandparents died, their house was sold, some of their possessions—like the painting that had in its way played a role in the formation of my consciousness—found a home with the next generation until that generation, too, was nearly gone. As with many American families, there was an ancestral waterfall of too much stuff, too many objects of no apparent material worth that were held on to because they still factored into the memories of one relative or another.
Some of my cousins and siblings remembered the painting or cared about it; others did not. I was fond of it in a nostalgic way, but never thought to ask whether it was anything more than just a random pastoral scene that had been acquired at some art bazaar or middle-of-the road gallery somewhere. We knew only that it came from the Philippines and that it had been given to our grandmother by her brother, Victor Lednicky, who had lived in Manila for much of his life.
It hung above the mantel in my Aunt Rosemary’s house after my grandparents died, and after Rosemary’s death I guess nobody in Oklahoma City had the wall space for it, so it ended up under my Uncle Mike and Aunt Susan’s bed.
But then my brother Jim was going through some of Rosemary’s effects and found something interesting. It was a crumpled-up piece of paper, with our grandmother’s name, Gladys, written in ink in the top corner and below it a typed artist’s statement:
To Whom This May Concern:
I certify that the oil painting “Fruit Market”, on canvas size 20” by 26”, was painted by me in Manila during this year with materials imported from the United States of America.
Manila, October 21, 1952
Fernando C. Amorsolo
870 Lepanto, Manila
The name of the artist was unfamiliar—to us, anyway. But it would not have been unfamiliar to anyone who knew anything about the history of art in the Philippines. In fact, Fernando Amorsolo was one of the most beloved and prolific painters that country has ever produced, the “master of Philippine sunlight” whose idyllic landscapes and scenes of rural life helped consolidate and celebrate a particular version of Filipino identity—a comfortable, bucolic world seemingly untouched by revolution and war and colonial exploitation.
Amorsolo, who became the first National Artist of the Philippines, was born in 1892, six years before the islands were ceded to the United States as a result of the Spanish-American War. His talent was recognized early, earning him multiple awards at the University of the Philippines’s School of Fine Arts. He became an instructor there soon after he graduated, and in 1919 a Manila gin magnate bankrolled his artistic education in Spain, where he encountered old-world European influences such as Goya and Velázquez and absorbed some of the impressionists’ brushstroke techniques and fascination with natural light and color.
When he returned to the Philippines, Amorsolo was in demand by wealthy Americans who wanted their portraits painted, even as he gravitated in his more private work to depictions of a rural world untouched by the rampant incursions of American culture. Among the best known of these images is Under the Mango Tree, yet another grouping of fruit pickers, in which a woman in the foreground, seen from behind, is resting her arm on a heavy branch as she talks to someone who looks remarkably like the central figure in the painting that hung in my grandparents’ house. In fact, it could be the same mango tree.
After Japan invaded the Philippines, in 1941, Amorsolo uneasily hung on in Manila and continued to produce idealized canvases for Japanese patrons who admired his work. But he didn’t ignore the chaos and violence that had seized the country, painting scenes of burning ships in the harbor, destroyed churches, and—in another famous painting, Defend Thy Honor—a Filipino man holding a machete and shielding a woman from the prospect of rape by a Japanese soldier.
Amorsolo died in 1972, the father of perhaps as many as twenty children and the creator of some 10,000 works of art: landscape paintings, portraits, postcards, illustrations for children’s books, comic strips, and a vast range of commercial art.
Left: Fernando C. Amorsolo’s Fruit Market, painted in Manila in 1952. Photograph by Sarah Karlan
Top: Identifying information on the back of the canvas. Photograph by Sarah Karlan
Knowing that Fruit Market was the work of a famous artist made what had once been a pleasant wall decoration a thing of value to be nervous about. My cousin Carolyn decided it needed to be retrieved from under her parents’ bed and—because I apparently had the strongest emotional attachment to it—placed in my care.
It had been decades since I had laid eyes on the painting, and when Carolyn and I met at her brother Michael’s house in Dallas and she removed the mattress pad that she had protectively wrapped around it, I did my best to conceal a swooning fit as waves of remembering swept in. They weren’t specific memories, just an understanding of how at various ages from childhood to adulthood I had noticed that never-moving young woman sitting calmly in the shade.
When I hung the painting in my house in Austin, I did so with care, because this piece of canvas in its ancient fifties frame seemed like a fragile artifact that might, like some unearthed papyrus scroll, crumble and evaporate. It was comforting to stare at something so deeply rooted in my awareness, rewarding to see it with new eyes as the work of an important artist. I looked close and scrutinized Amorsolo’s brushstrokes, then gently touched the painting with my finger. The not-so-taut, almost swaying feel of the canvas made it seem alive and vulnerable.
“Yeah, that’s a gold mine,” Joe Lednicky told me when I brought the painting to him for his opinion of its value. Joe is my second cousin, a former NASA engineer and now the owner of Primal Gallery, a sprawling and eclectic institution in Dripping Springs that shows the work of local artists and sells everything from fine art paintings to pre-Columbian pottery to plastic action figures.
If Joe was impressed, I was impressed. He had sold Amorsolo paintings before and said that this one was probably worth at least $75,000. It was Joe’s grandfather, Victor Lednicky, who had originally acquired the painting before giving it to my grandmother.
Victor had been a legendary figure in our family, a young man from Everest, Kansas, who graduated from the University of Kansas in 1911 with a degree in mining engineering and made his way to the Philippines a few years later, where—ignoring sensational warnings about headhunters—he befriended Igorot tribespeople who had worked the mines on Luzon since the days of the Spanish and before them the Chinese. He later founded the Lepanto Consolidated Mining Company, a major player in copper and silver production.
Among Joe’s many family treasures is a big memorial plaque that features a bronze bas relief of his grandfather’s hairless head surrounded by depictions of game animals, with the inscription “Victor E. Lednicky, 1888–1970. Pioneer Mining Engineer and Geologist. Explorer—Marksman—Adventurer.”
He was all of those things, as well as a pretty colorful writer, as can be seen in this typical passage from a pamphlet he authored about the early days of American mining in the Philippines. “Much tapuy was drunk, the subtle cane-wine of the Ifugao, that looks like Brittany cider and is served he-men in deep goblets. Wahoo!”
Victor was a captain in the U.S. Army during World War I. In his early days in the Philippines he became friendly with the sultan of the Malaysian state of Johor and helped with the construction of a major causeway between Johor and Singapore. He and the sultan were also shooting companions, and Victor entered the annals of Philippine wildlife literature when, at a place called Mount Data, in Luzon, he snared a specimen of Crateromys schadenbergi, a “curious” and apparently elusive animal otherwise known as the giant bushy-tailed cloud rat. A lizard that he found on Masbate Island in 1917 bears the scientific name Sphenomorphus lednickyi.
He was such a good shot that John Lednicky, Joe’s older brother, a microbiologist at the University of Florida, remembers as a child watching his aging grandfather set Coke bottles on their sides and, from forty feet, reliably send a bullet through their open necks.
Victor Lednicky was a man of his time, a scrappy American entrepreneur who I suppose these days might be considered something of a colonizer, an extractor of native minerals, a killer of harmless giant bushy-tailed cloud rats. But according to Joe he was an almost profligate benefactor—churches all over the Philippines feature stained-glass windows with plaques beneath them stating “donated by V.E.L.” And he doesn’t appear to have had an imperial mindset. In an interview he gave as a young man to a Kansas newspaper in 1924, he argued that American control of the Philippines needed to come to an end. “The Filipinos are as ready for their independence now as they ever will be . . . the only thing left to do is to free the islands.”
John remembers hearing that General Douglas MacArthur visited the Lednicky home in Manila just before the onset of World War II to ask Victor to stop selling copper to the Japanese, Lepanto’s biggest client. He complied, and when the Japanese invaded the islands, he also helped supply firearms to Filipino resistance fighters, who smuggled the weapons through Japanese checkpoints by hiding them in an odoriferous fish sauce called bagoong that they knew the guards would be reluctant to inspect.
For his part in helping to defy the invasion, Victor had to go into hiding, but he was captured, and, John said, the Japanese ordered him to go back to his mine and make it operational again. Instead, he dynamited it. He would have been beheaded except that a Japanese general in Manila was his former trading partner. Spared execution, he was thrown into the infamous Santo Tomas prison camp. My grandmother once told me she never knew whether her brother was alive or not until, after the camp was liberated in 1945, she saw his name on a list of freed prisoners in Life magazine. I’ve gone through every wartime issue of Life without finding that reference, but a 1943 article in the San Francisco Examiner mentions him building showers for the other internees. According to John, he also built a water purification and pumping system and invented a code that prisoners could use to communicate with one another.
Victor’s stories about life and starvation in the camp, John told me, “were horror after horror.” When he was finally released, he weighed 85 pounds. He went back to work at his copper mine and rebuilt—and surpassed—his fortune. But a long-standing business rivalry with Ferdinand Marcos, the authoritarian president who came to power in 1965, led to a serious downturn in Victor’s wealth and influence.
When Victor died in 1970, a viewing was held in a small chapel in Quezon City. Though he was a longtime resident of the Philippines, he wasn’t a citizen and was denied the privilege of being interred in a well-maintained first-class cemetery. He was buried instead in Oklahoma City. I remember my mother telling me that a woman whom nobody knew showed up at the graveside service. She explained to the family that when she was a girl she had been interned in the Santo Tomas prison, and Victor had saved her life by sharing his food with her.
Did Victor Lednicky know Fernando Amorsolo? Neither of my second cousins could tell me for sure, but it seems likely they were at least acquaintances, because hanging in Joe’s office in the gallery were portraits of Victor, Joe’s grandmother Maria, and great-grandparents on both sides of the family—all painted by Amorsolo.
I have very hazy memories of Victor—impressions of a lively, talkative stranger from far away whom my relatives made a big stir about when he visited. I would have first seen the artwork he gave my grandmother not long after Amorsolo painted it, in 1952, when perhaps the oil on the canvas was still uncured and a bit tacky to the touch.
The colors set down by the brush of the master of Philippine sunlight would probably have been brighter back then—I don’t think the painting has ever been cleaned—but they were still bright enough to create a familiar sensation of calm whenever I looked at this Edenic image hanging in my own hallway.
What were we supposed to do with it? A recent episode of Antiques Roadshow, in which someone brought in two Amorsolo paintings for appraisal, confirmed Joe Lednicky’s opinion of its worth. But it didn’t belong to me; it was the property—the shared legacy—of an extended family. Seventy-five thousand dollars divided among fifteen living cousins might be a nice bump but maybe not enough of an incentive to give up the painting and the memories associated with it. There was always the option of donating it to a museum, but Amorsolo’s placid scene, with its focus on an imaginary sense of contentment among manual laborers, strikes me as too painterly and apolitical to guarantee it a spot in a contemporary museum’s permanent collection. And for it to be hidden away in an institution’s back room where I couldn’t see it when I wanted to would not feel all that different from its still being underneath my aunt and uncle’s bed.
I was nervous to have it in my house, though. It was the most expensive thing that had ever been there, worth more than all our appliances, furniture, TVs, computers, and HVAC combined. And unlike those objects, it came with an obligation, a responsibility to remember the artist who had painted it, the adventurer who had bought it, the world in which it had once resided. When the burden of its financial and emotional worth began to outweigh the satisfaction of having it near at hand, I took it down from the wall and placed it in temporary custody elsewhere, where I wouldn’t have to worry about it so much, where I could see it every now and then but not every day. It was a mild painting but a potent one; sometimes—I began to think—it was too stark a reminder of all the people I had known and loved who had once paused before it and had now passed on.
Because that painting, by now, feels eternal. That may just be the vanity of my experience, because I had been staring at it from such a young age, watching the woman in the yellow scarf forever defying time under the shade of a mango tree. Whether it’s truly a timeless painting is something that nobody can answer. Like anyone who encounters a work of art in true innocence, without the encumbrance of expectations, without an awareness of its assigned aesthetic or commercial worth, I can value it only for its impact. And what this mysterious scene from the other side of the world will always be to me is a brushstroke on the canvas of my life.
This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Unknown Masterwork.” Subscribe today.
