Laso, Francisco (1823–1869)

Francisco Laso (b. 8 May 1823; d. 14 May 1869), Peruvian artist and writer. A painter influenced by the French romantic tradition who focused on Peruvian subjects, Laso was born in Tacna and studied at the Academy of Painting and Drawing in Lima, where he was assistant to Ignacio Merino, director of the academy. He went to Paris in 1842 to study with the painter Hippolyte Delaroche. On visits to Rome and Venice he was influenced by Titian and Veronese. In 1847 he returned to Peru and traveled throughout the countryside, sketching Indians. During a second trip to Europe he studied with the genre painter Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre in Paris. In Gleyre's atelier, Laso finished his famous El indio Alfarero (The Indian Potter, also known as Dweller in the Cordillera, 1855), a painting of a young Indian holding a Mochica ceramic piece, which is considered a forerunner of Peruvian indigenist art in the twentieth century. Upon his return to Peru in 1856, he was commissioned to paint The Four Evangelists for the Cathedral of Lima and the Saint Rose of Lima (1866) in the municipal palace. Laso worked as a Red Cross volunteer during the yellow fever epidemic of 1868 in Peru and fell victim to it. He died at the height of his career.

See alsoArt: The Nineteenth Century .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–1980 (1989), p. 39.

Oriana Baddeley and Valerie Fraser, Drawing the Line: Art and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Latin America (1989), p. 17.

Juan E. Ríos, La pintura contemporánea en el Perú (1946).

Additional Bibliography

Majluf, Natalia. "The Creation of the Image of the Indian in 19th-century Peru: The Paintings of Francisco Laso (1823–1869)." Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1995.

                                              Marta Garsd