Watercolour

This watercolour, made by an unknown artist from the Philippines, is among the earliest objects to enter the V&A’s collection. One of eight by the same hand, the works fall under a genre called tipos del país (‘types of the country’) popularised in nineteenth-century Manila. These small paintings portrayed local people in ‘typical’ dress, and were fashionable souvenirs for foreign traders in the latter part of the Spanish colonial period (1565–1898). Often, they were inscribed with titles that flattened their subjects into reductive socio-ethnic categories.