Anónimo (Escuelas al Aire Libre)

Girl with a pheasant is a representative example of the kind of work produced at the Open-Air Painting School in Tlalpan, which was under the direction of Francisco Díaz de León beginning in 1924. The School’s students – ranging from 9 to 15 years of age – were drawn from the predominantly agrarian peasant families living in the Tlalpan neighborhood.

The teaching at the Tlalpan facility was based on the idea of creative freedom, and its focus was geared toward the development of spontaneity and self-instruction. As a result, the works produced there were characterized by freshness, directness, and naïveté. The license students were given to create autonomously encouraged the production of work displaying both simplicity and a certain primitivism in its manufacture and composition.

Girl with Pheasant was surely painted by a young student. The portrait reveals various meaningful qualities, such as the handling of the girl’s dress and shawl. The painting’s white tonalities – enriched by small gray lines that shade and give volume to the folds of the costume – are set off against its gray background, which also serves to bring out the dark tones of the girl’s hair, face, arm, and legs. The pheasant at the center, with its slight touches of green, red, ocher, and yellow, endows the figure with a playfulness, contrasting with – and softening – the work’s predominantly tonal austerity.