Solos ("Alone"), painted in oil on canvas in 1898 by the Mexican academic painter Félix Parra Hernández (1845–1919), depicts a grieving mother and her child standing together at the end of a path that leads toward what appears to be a cemetery. The surrounding landscape reinforces the painting's somber mood: dry, leafless trees, sparse withered grass, and a flat, overcast white sky stretching above them, stripped of any warmth or color that might soften the scene.
Parra trained at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, where he absorbed the rigorous, detail-oriented realism the institution demanded, a style he carried into his later work even as his career shifted toward more eclectic, internationally influenced subject matter by the century's end. Unlike his earlier, better-known history paintings depicting scenes from the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Solos turns away from grand national narrative entirely, choosing instead an intimate, anonymous moment of private loss.
The painting has since been recognized as one of the more emotionally resonant works in Mexican academic painting of its era, included in the Museo Nacional de Arte's 2017 exhibition Melancolía, a show of roughly 130 works organized around themes of loss, grief, and mortality, where curators paired it with Manuel Ocaranza's La Cuna Vacía (The Empty Cradle) as one of the exhibition's most affecting pairings. The work's ownership is recorded as belonging to the Colección Galería Castillo, rather than MUNAL's own permanent holdings, based on its listing during the museum's 2013–2014 Parra retrospective.
Solos represents grief, loneliness, and the quiet pain of losing someone. The mother and child are walking together, but the title suggests that they are still emotionally alone in their grief. Their dark clothes, the empty path, dry trees, and pale sky create a feeling of sadness and emptiness. The path leading towards the cemetery makes the painting feel like a journey towards accepting death and loss. What stands out to me is that there is no dramatic expression of sadness. Instead, the grief is shown through their silence and stillness. I think the painting suggests that although people can experience loss together, grief is ultimately a deeply personal experience that everyone has to carry in their own way.
