Sometimes regarded as Juan Luna’s Mona Lisa for the mystery 
surrounding her identity, Una Bulaqueña (variably spelled as La Bulakeña or The Woman from Bulacan, 1895) is a full portrait of an unidentified fair-skinned serene young woman with cheerless eyes and thick eyebrows.
She wears a formal, multi-layered Filipino dress, the traje de mestiza, or what became widely known as the Maria Clara gown, the attire worn by the tragic character of Dr. Jose Rizal’s novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.
The outfit is composed of a kimono (inner blouse), a camisa or baro (shirt) made of pina and has wide butterfly sleeves with fine embroidetry, a pañuelo (piano shawl) that has been starched to achieve a raised look. A silk/satin olive green saya (long skirt) has slanted colored thin stripes laid over the naguas (starched petticoat). And a tapis (knee-length overskirt) covers its upper half.
She is believed from a well-off family of Bulacan as indicated by her over-all demeanor and the gold neck chain she wears. Her black hair is gathered into a bun and she holds a fan with the right hand and white cotton handkerchief with her left hand, both down, in a crossed manner. The fan language of colonial Filipino women signifies that she is willing to have a boyfriend.
As a widower in need of a new lover, Luna must have been struck by the lady’s beauty and likely planned to court her, perhaps with the portrait. This availability must have inspired Luna to paint her with mastery of perspective and details, silently regarded as his most impressive portrait.
This woman must hold a personal importance to him as she holds the distinction of being the only extant portrait he did lifesize. His typical painting of females was from the thigh up. Even the paintings of his wife Paz Pardo De Tavera were rendered that way (and most of such paintings were burned by her family after the tragic oxiricide and the cold blood murder of his mother-in-law out of extreme jealousy; some were torched during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines.)
In deciding who the lady depicted in Una Bulaquena is, two basic requirements must be fulfilled: that she is from Bulacan and her personal circumstances must be consistent with available historical data about Luna. Accessible information about him from 1894 to 1896 is skimpy by itself.
In May 1894, after being out of the country for 17 years, Luna moved back from France to Spain to the Philippines with son Andres and brother Antonio Luna. This was after he was acquitted of the murder of Paz. It was still peace time in the Philippines despite the widespread social injustice exposed by Dr. Rizal’s banned novels. He had not been executed in Bagumbayan (now Rizal Park) at that time and the Katipunan was still a secret organization that fomented the Philippine Revolution led by Andres Bonifacio.
During this homecoming, Luna painted mostly family portraits, including that of Una Bulaquena, Governor General Ramon Blanco, landscapes, and the painting that became to be known as Tampuhan (“Sulking,” not its original title).
After staying put in the country for more than a year, the footloose painter travelled to Japan in the summer of 1896 with his student Gaston O’Farrell, producing as many as 20 paintings. Upon return to the Philippines in August 1896, he was arrested with Antonio by the Spanish constabulary for complicity in the Philippine Rebellion.
Una Bulaquena has an impressive provenance. As Luna’s sole heir, it passed on to Andres. When Andres died in 1952, the Philippine government acquired the painting and placed it at the National Museum of the Philippines (NMP). From 1957, it was loaned and put on display in Malacañang. In its deteriorated condition, it used to be displayed at the Music Room where First Ladies customarily received callers, hanged above the grand piano. After the Edsa revolution when Malacañang was turned into a museum and opened to the public, the painting began to get attention. Through the effort of the Pres. Joseph Estrada, Una Bulaquena was transferred to the NMP.
The painting was eventually exhibited in New York and Seattle, USA, and after its return to the Philippines, it had to undergo major conservation work in 2010 as the painting showed signs of deterioration. A thick wax residue used in previous restoration was removed. Total consolidation was done to stabilize the cracks, tenting, paint losses and powdery paint layers. After a year of conservation, Una Bulaquena was declared a National Cultural Treasure and it is now exhibited at Gallery III of NMP’s National Art Gallery with other Luna paintings and boteros (studies).
In the absence of historical data and photos of Una Bulaquena, four possibilities about who she is have been hypothesized in the following persons:
DOLORES “LOLENG” SABAS. Juan and Antonio were so close to each other that they had a tendency to do things together, yes, even in courting. They did that when they returned to the Philippines in 1894, but no one was able to marry.
Santiago Pilar Albano, author of the definitive book on the painter, Juan Luna: the Filipino as Painter, suggested that the Una Bulaquena was Dolores, nicknamed Loleng, a daughter of Doña Mariquita Sabas, who lived in 2 Espeleta Street, Binondo, Manila, which the Luna brothers frequented for tertulia gatherings. There is no clear indication if Loleng was from Bulacan.
EMILIA TRINIDAD. According to Rosalinda Orosa, a prominent journalist and advocate of culture and arts, the owner of the Luna painting, the Tampuhan, the woman could be Emiliana Trinidad, Orosa’s ancestor and the same woman who was the sitter in his Tampuhan painting.
Tampuhan shows a woman wearing a Maria Clara gown with saya in flower prints. She is seated in the living room of a bahay na bato with a man, Dr. Ariston Bautista Lin, Luna’s friend. Bautista Lin has his back turned, however, as he is watching a procession from the bay window. Their positions strongly suggest they are having an estrangement.
MARIA “IYANG” RODRIGO FERNANDO. According to multi-awarded writer, publisher and cultural icon Gilda Cordero-Fernando, Dr. Asuncion N. Fernando said the woman could be Maria “Iyang” Rodrigo Fernando, Dr. Fernando’s own grandmother, who assisted in the cause of the Katipunan.
Historian Antonio Valeriano, on the other hand, noted that the woman in the portrait has facial features that are similar to the Rodrigos of Bulacan, Bulacan, such as Francisco “Soc” Rodrigo’s “bushy eyebrows and sad eyes.”
Cordero-Fernando argues in “Maria joins the revolution” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI) of March 12, 2006:
“Maria Rodrigo was born of Gertrudis Macapugay and Nicolas Rodrigo in Bulacan, Bulacan, in front of the house of the great propagandist Marcelo H. del Pilar.
“Maria (‘Iyang’) had large, soulful eyes with drooping lids, dark lashes and thick eyebrows. Her hair was curly and her skin creamy white. She married Francisco ‘Kikoy’ Fernando, of landed gentry, in 1885 when she was about 18. She gave birth to five boys in succession.
“Luna and Antonio came all the way from Batac on horseback and stayed in Bulacan a few days. Antonio was always in a closed-door huddle with del Pilar while Luna wandered on a horse all over town, looking for nice views to sketch. Boys followed him about, peering over his shoulder at his drawing pad.
“One day, around 1883 or 1884, goes the town legend, Luna spotted the pretty Maria, who was 15 or 16 then, in the house of Del Pilar. He must have found her exceptionally good-looking because he requested that she go home and change into a Maria Clara, saying he wanted to paint her. He made several pencil sketches of Maria. The portrait in oil was finished much later, in Luna’s studio, in Calle Alix in Sampaloc in 1895.
“Iyang, who suffered from marital oppression, decided to leave her family to join the Katipunan and never returned.”
Alikabok, the Filipino musical inspired by Luna’s Una Bulaqueña, with Rachel Alejandro in the role with the imaginary name of Bising Vallejo, who turned a Katipunera, was staged at the Music Museum in 1995 and 2002.
To verify her identity, Benita Marasigan Santos, granddaughter of Del Pilar, Mila Enriquez of the Bulacan Historical Commission, and Fernando’s sister-in-law, Dr. Asuncion “Nic” Fernando did an investigation in the ‘70s on Una Bulaquena. They went to Bulacan to interview its old residents who were asked to remember the events of their childhood and what they heard older relatives say.
Continues Fernando-Cordero’s article: “The trio dug for old photos and church records more than a century old. The visit of Juan Luna ‘who was drawing Iyang’ was well-remembered by Maria’s first cousin, Angelina Rodrigo, who lived with her in the same house. So was Juan Luna, remembered by another interviewee, emerging from the Del Pilar stable on a horse. The young boys who followed him around, by then very old men, remembered the visit of ‘Don Marcelo’s friend,’ too.
“There was no existing photograph of Maria to compare the painting with, but by sleuthing, the three found a group picture of Maria’s two brothers and two sisters in their advanced age. They all looked like Maria. If features are indeed a clue, then add to that the striking resemblance of trademark eyes and bushy eyebrows to present-day Rodrigos -- the late Sen. Francisco ‘Soc’ Rodrigo, whose father is the younger brother of Maria, his daughter Ditas, and her cousins Fenina and Dodo Ayuyao.
“‘And of course,’ says Benita, “the subject had to be a native of Bulacan, that’s why Juan Luna entitled it La Bulakeña. Why was she not identified by Juan Luna? (Maybe he didn’t remember her name.) Why was it not painted in oil until 10 years later? (Maybe he discovered he liked his sketches of her only then. It is a minor painting).”
Benita Marasigan Santos wrote a story entitled La Bulakeña in the 1970s which did not result in conclusive findings. Problematic about this account was the year, 1883 or 1884, that Luna was supposed to have made the Una Bulaquena sketches.
By 1877, Luna had migrated to Europe and was not known to have gone back to the Philippines until his return in 1894. By 1883, he had started to paint Spoliarium that won a gold medal in May 1884 at Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes.
On June 25, 1884, Filipino and Spanish nobles organized an event celebrating Luna’s win in the exhibition with Jose Rizal giving an impromptu speech that gave the mural political color as the glorification of genius and the grandeur of a Filipino’s artistic skills that made him co-equal with any citizen of the world.
Could the investigation’s oral accounts on the year the sketches were made by Luna, 1883 or 1884, be wrong? Could it be possible the sketching and painting both took place in 1895?
There is something wrong in the computation of her age based on the information gathered by said team. The portrait’s subject was supposed to be 15 or 16 when Luna sketched her in 1883 or 1884, but when she married in 1895, she was 19. She should have been 28 or 29 when she tied the knot in 1895.
Assuming that Iyang is “Una Bulaquena,” this writer likes to posit that the time of the sketching as reported is wrong and it could have been in 1893 or 1894, more likely in 1894, which is closer to 19 when Iyang married. That is verifiable with available registry documents.
And there could be a relationship between the painting and her marriage: was it an arranged or a rushed marriage? Cordero-Fernando did not indicate. If she did, it could have shed some information about the relationship I pointed out.
EMILIANA TRINIDAD DE SANTOS. Ambeth R. Ocampo writes in the PDI on May 28, 2017 that Carmelino Alvendia Jr. invited him to dinner in 2015 to meet his first cousin Ma. Esperanza de Santos Pahati-Olivera, who claimed Una Bulaqueña was her grandmother, Emiliana Trinidad de Santos, supported by photos.
He did not go to the extent of sharing basic information likely gathered during the meeting such as Emilia’s province of origin and other personal information. In an article entitled to have identified Una Bulaquena, the authority on Philippine history lamely ends: “As for the rest of the story — Emiliana, Juan and her wonderful portrait? Let’s leave that for younger historians to find out.”
However, I digress. Until new and more definitive information about Una Bulaquena’s identity can be made available, Maria “Iyang” Rodrigo Fernando comes closest to the abovestated requirements of the identity of the young lady.
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Flirting with Una Bulaqueña
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