San Isidro Labrador

This painting depicts San Isidro Labrador (Isidore the Farmer), an eleventh century Spanish farm laborer and the patron saint of farmers. In this work, the Bolivian painter Joaquín Castañon shows San Isidro dressed as a nineteenth-century gentleman farmer in hieratic scale, surrounded by scenes of everyday life in the Bolivian countryside. This painting is an example of costumbrismo, a nineteenth century creative movement in Europe and Latin America that interpreted everyday life in a romanticized style.