San Isidro Labrador

Labrador was an 11th century Spanish farm laborer and the patron saint of farmers. Joaquín Castañón shows San Isidro dressed as a nineteenth-century gentleman farmer in hieratic scale, surrounded by scenes of everyday life in the Bolivian countryside.

The scenes that appear all around the image of San Isidro convey aspects of rural life in 19th century Bolivia. For example, there is a couple dressed in native regalia preparing a meal over a fire alongside their herd of llamas.

On the top left-hand side there is a procession taking place with groups dressed in colonial-era and pre-columbian Native regalia, alongside a group of Afro-descended dancers. This may represent a feast day procession for San Isidro.

San Isidro is pictured here performing one of the miracles he is known for, where he caused fresh water to burst from the earth. He performed this miracle to quench the thirst of his patron.

Joaquín Castañón was a painter from Cochabamba, Bolivia. Little is known about his body of work, but he established fame as a local portrait painter in ninteenth-century Cochabamba.

The style of this painting is known as costumbrismo. Costumbrismo was a nineteenth-century creative movement in Europe and Latin America that interpreted everyday life in a romanticized style.