Gnawing Portrait

My first visit to the National Museum was supposed to educate me about the atrocities committed by the Spaniard towards the Philippines. The visit was required by one of my subjects in college. As I visually rummaged through the various paintings, it was not the historical Spolarium that caught my eye, it was a simple painting of an infant.

As I looked closely at the painting, the sleeping infant, who looks to be 2 to 3 months old, slumbers so innocently wearing his baptismal gown. The painting captured the delicate smile and fan of the infant’s eyebrows on his cheeks as he sleeps. Looking at it, it made me sigh at how lovely the picture was. Too bad that during that time there were no digital cameras or even cellphone cameras I can use to capture the image. Interested and intrigued, I looked at the description.

There was a story to the picture, a sad one. The painter was a father who has lost a child. Gazing upon it, I felt the father’s pain. To encapsulate every detail of a child he only had a few months to hold in the painting is so moving that even after hundreds of years it still had that power to touch hearts.

It was 1998 when I saw that painting for the first time. Year 2014, I embarked to recapture my interest in the arts by going to the National Museum again. The old building was different, and the painting was no longer in its original place. I asked a museum staff stationed at the lobby if they have seen a painting of a dead baby, and he pointed me to the newly renovated gallery. There it was, on display with a big wall all his own, is the sleeping infant that captured my heart.

Just by looking at the painting, I wouldn’t have known it that time that the baby already passed away were it not for the signage just below the portrait. Maybe that is the reason why the image is so alive; to make us feel that even in death, the love we have for our dearly departed will never leave us and will continue to inspire us to live our lives.