Juan Luna
Encyclopedia : J : JU : JUA : Juan Luna
Juan Luna y Novicio, (1857 – 1899) a Filipino painter, was born on October 23, 1857 in Badoc, Ilocos Norte, the third child of seven children. He showed artistic promise early on and was encouraged to take painting and traveled to Rome to study the masters. He settled in Paris and married a prominent Filipina from the 'Mestizaje' family of Pardo de Tavera. In a rage over his suspicion of infidelity on the part of his wife Maria de la Paz, he mercilessly shot her and her mother to death in September of 1892. Tried by a French court and subsequently convicted in 1893, he was sentenced to pay the victims' immediate kin but one franc each for their loss, as the court had deemed the murders a crime of passion. In 1894, Luna returned to the Philippines after an absence of almost 20 years.
His most famous piece, The Spoliarium, for which he won top prize at the 1884 Madrid Exposition hangs in the National Museum in Manila.
Upon his return to the Philippines, he was arrested two years later under suspicion of sedition. He was later pardoned. His brother, General Antonio Luna, was an active participant in the insurgent Katipunan movement.
In 1898, after the United States defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War, the fledgling Philippine Republic appointed him as a delegate to the Paris convention and to Washington, D.C. to help gain recognition of Philippine sovereignty and independence.
Luna died in Hong Kong December 7, 1899, in Hong Kong. He was rushing home from Europe after hearing of his brother’s assassination by members of the Katipunan.
References
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.