Author Description

Between 1914 and 1917, the artist and art critic Teófilo Castillo published twenty-four texts grouped under the title "Interiores limeños". At the time, they appeared in the magazine Variedades and the newspaper La Prensa. More than a hundred years later, art historian Nanda Leonardini Herane brings together the aforementioned essays by Castillo for the first time. The book also includes a long study in which she comments on each of the Lima interiors, as well as footnotes and a series of indexes that will contribute to the study, analysis, and understanding of Peruvian collecting at the beginning of the 20th century. "In the 1910s, art museums in Peru were non-existent, so the city mass only reached the works of art through temples, some buildings and public sculptures or few temporary exhibitions. In parallel, there was a small, privileged group that accessed the visual arts on their trips abroad or when entering royal collections in the hands of wealthy people; collections that, sometimes, came from inheritance or were newly created thanks to the sensitivity, knowledge and criteria of their owners. So, with the series "Interiores limeños" Teófilo Castillo takes a step forward by opening, to some extent, some of the houses in the capital city (Lima) that treasured interesting national and foreign artistic heritage through disciplines such as painting, sculpture, lithography and ceramics. This way, these articles allowed the reader access to a cultural heritage kept and cared for by individuals, in a country where the State, in its obligation as a republican nation, did not intend to assume a project of this nature. Undoubtedly, the study of the history of Peruvian collecting begins with "Interiores limeños", the reason why we took this series as an object of research with the idea of encouraging new projects in a field still untouched.." (HKB Translation) --Page 17.