Self-portrait

The portrait genre was very important in XIXth-century México, both in the capital and in the provinces. Hermenegildo Bustos, one of the most important exponents of the so-called regional painting", devoted a large part of his life to portraying the inhabitants of his town, Purísima del Rincón, Guanajuato, on copper. Though there is little information on his training as a painter, recent researh suggests that he may have studied his trade in León, Guanajuato, with Juan Nepomuceno Herrera, with whom he does, indeed, have certain stylistic traits in common. In this self-portrait, the artist does not shrink from his customary austere realism when depicting his own swarthy, angular face inside an oval format, staring straight at the spectator. This small-scale work shows the artist in 1891, at the age of 59. Recent research into the materials used in the paint have revealed that the inscriptions on the front and back of- this painting were added at a later date, though it is not known who painted them and when. However, the rest of the materials used in the work are those of Bustos and the style matches his. One possible explanation for such alterations to an original work is that, during the XIXth and early-XXth centuries, popular paintings, as they were called at the time, were not deemed to constitute art, being, rather, items that served decorative and documentary ends and were subject to transformation over time. On the other hand, it may well be that some collector or other thought that the value of the work would increase if there was no doubt about its authorship. Bustos, who always showed a certain amount of psychological insight in his works, did not fail to exercise the same faculty when painting this self-portrait, which has been part of the MUNAL's collection since 1992.