The Widower

Fernando Botero's production has been widely analyzed in relation to the writers of the Latin American boom—his contemporaries—led by Gabriel García Márquez, with whom he shares the irony of the idiosyncrasy of Latin American countries, violence as an element of everyday life and religion as the roots of a prudish and macho society. In "El viudo", violence seems implicit in the theme of the early absence of the mother-wife, to whom an altar has been consecrated with her youthful image, a candle and a rosary. However, far from referring to misfortune or being saddening—despite the tearful faces of all the characters in the scene, including the dog—, the painting seems to make laughable the cold and inexperienced maternal attitude of a father in a society that grants this role exclusively to women. In this way, love and death as themes of the Latin American narrative coincide with the tragicomedy that Botero poses in this image.