Entrando a la Boca

A lifelong denizen of La Boca, the once blighted port district of Buenos Aires, Quinquela embraced the docks as his singular and endearing subject. Essentially self-taught, he adapted an idiosyncratic Impressionist style, rendering the waterfront and the working-class "boquenses" with glimmering, atmospheric light and color. In "Entrando a La Boca", the blinding intensity of daylight is diffused across the water, broken by a rich impasto of color—mauve, cerulean blue, olive green, viridian—reflected in rippling waves from the barges moving toward shore. This chromatic chiaroscuro paints the routine arrival of people and goods at the mouth of the Riachuelo River with a quiet solemnity, calling to mind La Boca’s storied industrial history in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a time of surging international trade and port activity. Quinquela’s waterfront scenes celebrate Argentine commerce and the largely Italian immigrant community that settled in La Boca and whose labor sustained its maritime economy.

This text was created in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and written by Abigail McEwen.