Lady bathing at Chorrillos

By the 1830s, the Limeño Francisco Fierro had produced an ample body of images on Lima in engravings and watercolors. Through his vast repertoire he recorded public life, the street trades, the dresses, dances and celebrations typical of the old city. His watercolors, initially acquired by travelers and foreign residents in Peru, later found acceptance amongst Lima intellectuals and collectors, who saw in his work prized documents of lost local traditions. Painted in 1850, the work represents a lady bathing at Chorrillos, a seaside resort located south of Lima. Its composition repeats an iconographic motif that had been fixed a little more than a decade earlier, apparently by Fierro himself. The subject here requires the representation of a marine background which, although succinctly treated, contrasts with the blank white grounds against which most of Fierro’s subjects stand.