MANILA, Philippines — Located in La Loma Cemetery is a neglected tomb covered in tall grass and vines. The unusual tomb, which has been mostly unnoticed because of its location, features a sculpture of a man with European features: Prominent beard and pointed nose.
Here lies Joaquin Maria Herrer y Rodriguez, a long-lost Spanish master painter from Madrid who went to Manila in the 19th century. The discovery of his tomb ended his descendants’ decades-long search for the great artist, which was also made possible by a simple Facebook post.
A Facebook user named Ronaldo Samson Adoptante posted the discovery on Facebook, saying his friend spotted a “lonely” tomb, took a picture of it, and posted it in Manila Nostalgia, a forum about the Manila of the past.
Master painter
Herrer was an art teacher in Escuela de Bellas Artes de Manila located on Calle San Sebastian in Quiapo, the old location of the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts. He later became an instructor the the UP SFA and was the teacher of National Artist Fernando Amorsolo.
He attended Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid and went to another art school in Paris called École des Beaux-Arts. Herrer studied with renowned Swiss artist Marc-Charles Gabriel Gleyre in a studio Gleyre got from French painter Paul Delaroche.
He exhibited some of his landscape paintings and still life drawings in Paris and Rome. Some were also shown at the Museo del Prado in Spain.
In 1915, he received a silver medal from the Panama-Pacific International Exposition at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California.
According to the inscription on his grave, Herrer born in Madrid in 1838 and died in Manila in 1917.
Herrer’s descendants
In a post on Facebook page Oficialización del Español en Filipinas, Adoptante said Herrer had no family in Manila when he moved there. The London-based Filipino consulted with the Prado museum in Madrid to feed his curiosity about the great painter.
Interestingly, the Prado assumed Herrer died in 1892.
“He arrived in Manila in 1893 and probably didn't get the chance to go back to Europe until his death in 1917, so the Prado website assumed that he died in the year he disappeared because no one knew he went to the Philippines,” Adoptante said in the post.
Adoptante wrote to the Prado Museum and told them that Herrer’s remains lie in Manila.
Four months later, he got a Facebook message from Jozsef Palfalvi—the husband of Krisztina Herrer y Marcher, the great-granddaughter and a direct descendant of Herrer, whose only son Cesar Maria Herrer y Marcher went to Budapest from Madrid to teach in the School of Arts in Budapest.
Herrer’s descendants had long been looking for the master painter's remains, saying that Adoptante’s message also coincides with his 100th death anniversary.
Palfalvi asked for Adoptante’s assistance to accompany his wife’s nephew Baazs Juhazs, the great-great-grandson of Herrer, to visit Herrer’s tomb in the Cayetano Arellano Mausoleum.
“We found the tomb and after some photoshoots realized that the descendant has the same profile like his ancestor,” said Adoptante.
“Another interesting twist in the story is that Julazs, the great-great-grandson of Joaquin worked for some time in Makati without knowing that his ancestor was buried in Manila.”
Adoptante said he eventually met the entire family in Budapest in November 2017 and saw the family's only link to their long lost ancestor—a painting of Herrer’s wife, Maria Angeles, painted by the great artist himself. — Philstar.com intern Edelito Mercene Jr