José Honorato Lozano (1815 or 1821-1885) was a Filipino painter born in

Manila Manila, officially the City of Manila, is the Capital of the Philippines, capital and second-most populous city of the Philippines after Quezon City, with a population of 1,846,513 people in 2020. Located on the eastern shore of Manila Bay on ...

. He is best known as the pioneering practitioner of the art form known as Letras y figuras, in which the letters of a patron's name is composed primarily by contoured arrangements of human figures surrounded by

vignette Vignette may refer to: * Vignette (entertainment), a sketch in a sketch comedy * Vignette (graphic design), decorative designs in books (originally in the form of leaves and vines) to separate sections or chapters * Vignette (literature), short, i ...

s of scenes in Manila - an art form that may have derived loosely from

illuminated manuscripts An illuminated manuscript is a formally prepared manuscript, document where the text is decorated with flourishes such as marginalia, borders and Miniature (illuminated manuscript), miniature illustrations. Often used in the Roman Catholic Churc ...

. Santiago Pilar, an authority on 19th-century paintings, described Lozano's works as "some of the most quaint and endlessly fascinating relics of Filipino culture in Spanish times". Lozano was the son of a

lighthouse A lighthouse is a tower, building, or other type of physical structure designed to emit light from a system of lamps and lens (optics), lenses and to serve as a beacon for navigational aid for maritime pilots at sea or on inland waterways. Ligh ...

keeper at

Manila Bay Manila Bay (; ) is a natural harbor that serves the Port of Manila (on Luzon), in the Philippines. Strategically located around the Manila, capital city of the Philippines, Manila Bay facilitated commerce and trade between the Philippines and ...

. He grew up in

Sampaloc, Manila Sampaloc is a district of Manila, Philippines The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an Archipelagic state, archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, it consists of List of is ...

outside the walled city of

Intramuros Intramuros () is the historic walled area within the city of Manila, the capital of the Philippines. It is administered by the Intramuros Administration with the help of the city government of Manila. Intramuros comprises a centuries-old hist ...

. A local commentator, Rafael Diaz Arenas, remarked as early as 1850 that Lozano was "a watercolourist without rival". Lozano also painted in the conventional ''costumbrista'' tradition as a means of supplying the demand for

souvenir A souvenir ( French for 'a remembrance or memory'), memento, keepsake, or token of remembrance is an object a person acquires for the memories the owner associates with it. A souvenir can be any object that can be collected or purchased and trans ...

s of Manila to foreign visitors. He also painted in oils and the

Spanish government The government of Spain () is the central government which leads the executive branch and the General State Administration of the Kingdom of Spain. The Government consists of the Prime Minister and the Ministers; the prime minister has the o ...

commissioned him to depict episodes from the history of Spanish rule in the country to be displayed during a fiesta in the district of

Santa Cruz, Manila Santa Cruz is a district in the northern part of the Manila, City of Manila, Philippines, located on the right bank of the Pasig River near its mouth. It is bordered by the districts of Tondo, Manila, Tondo, Binondo, Manila, Binondo, Quiapo, Ma ...

in 1848. José Maria A. Cariño, author of ''José Honorato Lozano: Filipinas 1847'', surmises that Lozano may have been trained by Chinese painters or Filipino painters skilled in

Chinese painting Chinese painting () is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world. Painting in the traditional style is known today in Chinese as , meaning "national painting" or "native painting", as opposed to Western styles of art which b ...

techniques. A folio of Lozano's watercolors surfaced in a 1995 episode of Antiques Roadshow (the UK edition) with appraiser Peter Nahum. The album had been commissioned by Emile Nyssens, and was sold at Christie's in 1995 for 265,000 British pounds; and a Spanish marquesa by another—not unless there were two or three separate albums floating around in Europe. But that folio appraised by Nahum went on to sell for GBP240,000 at a later auction. In 2021, ''Views of Manila'' (1850), a ''letras y figuras'' watercolor by Lozano that previously was in the collection of economic historian Benito J. Legarda was sold for a record PHP17.52 million (USD362,412.41), becoming the most expensive artwork sold by the artist internationally.

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Lozano, Jose Honorato Genre painters People from Sampaloc, Manila 1885 deaths Year of birth uncertain 19th-century Filipino painters Filipino male artists 19th-century male artists

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