Rare Juan Luna painting worth P9-12 million up for auction

A rare Juan Luna painting worth P9-12 million is up for auction in Makati City this month.

On September 19 and 20, Salcedo Auctions will feature the rediscovered “¿A Do...Va la Nave?” (oil on canvas, 55 cm x 104 cm) painted by Luna in 1885, a year after he earned a gold medal for "Spoliarium" at the Madrid Exposition. The painting is signed "LUNA Paris 1885."

It features six well-dressed women—one of them a bride with her face concealed by a veil—and three men, on board a boat with a gloomy sky as their backdrop.

According to Salcedo Auctions, the title of the painting borrows from an unfinished 1841 poem by 19th century Spanish Romantic poet Jose de Espronceda :

“Y alla va la nave;
Quien sabe do va?

[And there goes the ship;
Who knows where it will go?]

Journey to Manila

The auction house noted that the present owner of "¿A Do...Va la Nave?" inherited the painting from his grandmother, Maria Alberta Esther Susana Pignocchi-Bonaldi. Her husband Jose Domingo Bonaldi, whose grandfather was the first vice consul of Italy to Argentina, received it as a gift from his business associate Goar Mestre, a media tycoon who fled his home country of Cuba upon the triumph of Fidel Castro and the Communist Revolution.

Mestre, who pioneered the television and mass communication industry in Argentina, associated with the likes of President Juan Domingo and First Lady Evita Peron.  

One possible connection between them and the painter is through Felix Pardo de Tavera, the brother of Luna’s wife Paz, who settled in Buenos Aires with his Argentinian wife Agustina Manigot and worked there as a physician and a sculptor.

However, it is believed that with the bad blood between Luna and the Pardo de Taveras, Paz's family destroyed all of her husband's work in their possession.  

Another theory that is being investigated is Luna’s association with Spanish officials who traveled between the Philippines, Spain, and Cuba. — Trisha Macas/BM, GMA News