Paris
The bagoong[1] ordered by Luna – Kock’s lymph – Exhibiting paintings at Champ de Mars – Les Ignores, painting of the humble and the disinherited – Inspiration of socialist themes – To combat crude materialism, the exploitation of the poor, the struggle between the rich and the poor – Reading Le Socialismo Contemporain – Luna’s impressions of an iron foundry
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Paris
13 May 1891
Juan Luna
Dear Rizal,
We have not yet tried the bagoong. Are you planning to come back?
Friend Albert has left for Manila and carries the famous Kock’s lymph.
Here we are well and the weather is better.
Tomorrow is the opening of the exhibition at the Champ de Mars. It is the first time that I have two paintings hung on the socle. I should be satisfied now, for you know how I sell my paintings, like potatoes at the market. To my painting of the funeral I gave the title Les Ignores and as you must noted I now give attention to the humble and disinterested.[2]
What book would [you] advise me to read to inspire me? By someone who had written against this fake materialism and this infamous exploitation of the poor, the struggle of the rich with the wretched!
I am looking for a subject worthy to be developed on a canvas of eight meters.
I am reading La Socialismo Contemporain by E de Laveleye, which is a compilation of the theories of Karl Marx, Lasalle, etc. I find it most interesting, but what I would like is a book which stresses the miseries of our contemporary society, a kind of Divine Comedy, a Dante who would take a walk through the shops where one can hardly breathe and where he would see men, children, and women in the most wretched condition imaginable. Lad, I myself have gone to see an iron foundry. I spent there five hours and believe me that however hard-hearted one may be, the spectacle that I saw there has impressed me very greatly. Our compatriots, despite all the evils that the friars are doing to them, are happier by comparison with this wretchedness and death. There was a shop where sand and coal were being milled. As they become converted into the finest powder, they rise into huge clouds, and the whole place seemed to be enveloped in smoke. There everything was full of dust, and the ten or twelve workers engaged in refilling the mill with their shovels looked like corpses. Such was the wretched appearance of the poor! I was there three or four minutes and it seemed to me that I had swallowed sand and dust my whole life. They penetrated my nose, mouth, eyes… and to think that those wretched ones breathed coal and dust twelve hours. I believe that they are infallibly condemned to death and it is a crime to abandon thus such poor people.
A thousand regards of Paz, Doña Juliana, kisses from the children, and an embrace of
Yours affectionately,
Luna
P.S.
I remind you of what you have promised the Oriente de Manila for my brother José, who, by the way, has been appointed physician at San Juan de Dios.
03-627 [Reformists]
[1] Bagoong, a Philippines sauce made of fish cured with salt and sometimes wi ne relished by the Filipinos.
[2] A humanitarian movement had been sweeping Europe since the 1880’s and poverty and human misery brought by the Industrial Revolution were very much in the minds of social and political reformers, among whom were artists and literary men.