Street vendors were a constant sight in nineteenth-century Manila, providing the city with fresh food through their daily rounds. Among the familiar figures whose trades sustained urban colonial life were the lechera, or milkmaid, and the panadero, or baker.
José Honorato Lozano documented these figures as part of his watercolor illustrations of Philippine social life, a body of work produced in the mid-nineteenth century that parallels the tipos del país tradition in its attention to costume, occupation, and social type. The Lechera y Panadero depicts the milkmaid and baker in working dress with the goods of their trade, recording the everyday commerce of the colonial city. Lozano worked primarily in Manila and produced illustrations that served as visual records of Philippine society for both local and foreign audiences. His work is considered among the most detailed and culturally specific visual documentation of the Philippines in the Spanish colonial period.
This print preserves a record of the vendors whose daily trade fed the colonial capital.
Available as a fine art print
→ View print here
