A Painter of the people

Hermenegildo Bustos
Last year in a trip to Guanajuato I bumped into an event at the Alhondiga de Granaditas with paintings by Hermenegildo Bustos. There were about 20 pieces, mostly portraits. I was surprised when I saw that some of the people painted in those portraits had the same last names (Castillo - Barajas) as my great grandmother's family. Later this year I knew from my grandmother that we have had relatives in Bustos's native town since the last century.

Hermenegildo Bustos was a Mexican painter born on april 13th in 1832 in Purísima del Rincón, Guanajuato, a small town located about twenty miles from León, my native hometown. Along with Juan Nepomuceno Herrera, and Jose Justo Montiel, Hermenegildo Bustos is one of the most important artists of the second half of the XIX century in Guanajuato.

Always creative, Bustos would start every portrait as an exciting new proyect. Painting from nature, he inmortalized the people of his native Purisima and made them portraits with an uncanny accurate technique. The Amerindians, Mestizos and Criollos are all painted in a way that we can recognize them as the new evolving people from Mexico. He painted souls, he painted beyond what he saw. Looking at Busto's sitters is like looking at a memory lovely painted. My fantasy is that his models were courious people from a small old town in deep Mexico, And with great passion Bustos, was tring to give us an impression of who they were, challenging the passing times and probably a catholic traditionalism, of the region.

The sizes of his paintings were often small, he used oils and painted over metal, a very common method at that time in that region of Mexico (I personally have seen a really old painting of this style in my grandmothers home). His brushstroke is very loose and delicate. The backgrounds of his portraits are flat and somewhat grey, his palette is quite basic earthy and vibrant. Bustos's portraits seem traditional, but are actually modern. Bustos was an autodidact. He declared him self as an "amateur indian". There is no evidence of formal instruction in his paintings, he learned from books, and from the religious paintings he saw. He was an excentric person and besides being a painter, surprisingly he had different occupations such as iceman, quack doctor, gardener, moneylender, musician, tinsmith, building foreman, carpenter, and sculptor.

Octavio paz said: "After his death, in 1907 Bustos was almost completely forgotten. Like the rest of his nation, La Purísima was enveloped in the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Around 1920, the country at peace once again, we Mexicans began to scrutinize our past: we were looking for clues about what we had become, not what we once were. We were looking for ourselves. Popular art seemed simultaneously to be evidence of what we were and a confirmation that the nation had survived."

A few years later critics and students of Mexican culture began to discover Bustos's life and work.