The Portrait of Mrs. Amparo Rugarcia de Espinosa is a painting of refined simplicity. The model, seated on a purple cloth and accompanied by calla lilies, slightly tilts her face, outlining a smile. She is wearing a black dress and jewelry decorated with pearls. Her aristocratic image is complemented by a magnificent magenta knotted shawl that rests on her lap. The complementary relationship between green and yellow (from the background and the flowers) and the range of reds (fabrics, nails and lips) add harmony to a work that demonstrates a solid compositional balance, anchored by diagonals that converge at the height of the hands of Madame Amparo.
Women were a fundamental theme in the artistic conception of Diego Rivera. A good share of the women who inhabit his public works are creative powers, inspirations of life. In the private sphere, the women he portrayed also project vital energy, hence many are accompanied by flowers, fruit or else display their sensuality through their body.
The calla lilies that flank Mrs. Amparo Rugarcia - the wife of businessman and banker Don Manuel Espinosa Yglesias - replicate the distinguished bearing of the model, her beauty and vitality. These flowers constitute a recurring motif in Diego Rivera's easel work. He painted them for the first time in 1925 in the famous painting Festival of flowers and continued to recreate them during subsequent decades, especially from the forties on, often representing flower sellers in different variations on the subject, either using them as a formal resource in portraits, such as that of Natasha Gelman (1943) and that of Enriqueta Davila (1949) or the Nude with calla lilies (1944).
For the decade of the fifties, the "Calla lilies of Rivera" are part of Mexican iconography. Likewise, the shawl is an object loaded with nationalist significance due to its vernacular and mestizo origin. The one seen in this portrait is a representation of one from Santa Maria del Rio, San Luis Potosi, where the finest Mexican shawls are made. The length of the garment, as well as its elaborate braided fringe, are unusually long; it is a unique piece that was probably made to order. The use of the shawl was adopted and spread among the women of the Mexican elite in the decades after the Revolution, when artisan work was integrated into the discourse on national identity and popular art was understood as a recipient of the "soul of the people".
In the portrait of Madame Amparo, there is a significant tension between the sober elegance of her outfit and the superb shawl: she subtly expresses the dialectic between modernity and tradition that characterized post-revolutionary Mexican culture. By the fifties, Diego Rivera was a consecrated artist whose "national style" was based on both cosmopolitan modernity and indigenous tradition.
In the period in which he painted this portrait, he worked on projects where he interpreted techniques and themes of indigenous antiquity with a modern sense, such as the Tlaloc fountain in the Chapultepec Forest and the mural mosaic he created on the exterior wall of the Olympic stadium of Ciudad Universitaria.
The Portrait of Mrs. Amparo Rugarcia de Espinosa is a painting of refined simplicity. The model, seated on a purple cloth and accompanied by calla lilies, slightly tilts her face, outlining a smile. She is wearing a black dress and jewelry decorated with pearls. Her aristocratic image is complemented by a magnificent magenta knotted shawl that rests on her lap. The complementary relationship between green and yellow (from the background and the flowers) and the range of reds (fabrics, nails and lips) add harmony to a work that demonstrates a solid compositional balance, anchored by diagonals that converge at the height of the hands of Madame Amparo.
