The Dead Flower

Manuel Ocaranza is a Mexican painter popularly known for his contribution to the Romanticism and Costumbrism art movements in Mexico. Ocaranza was active at a very significant period in Mexican history, when painters were trying to formulate the idea of the Mexican identity through their artworks. His works incorporate a layered semiology fused with psychological drama and sentimentality. "The Dead Flower" is one of Ocaranza's most famous work. It is widely considered as a part of a two-part series dedicated to the Costumbrismo genre. The second painting is titled "The Love of the Hummingbird", officially Ocaranza never declared the two paintings as a pair but the scholars and critics of the time referred to them as "two stanzas of the same poem". The work depicts a young woman standing in a balcony-like setting which is filled with plants. Her hands are held against each other and brough up to her chest in a position of prayer and she gazes up into the sky drawing focus to the emotional and pensive state she is in. The palette used by Ocaranza further adds to the melancholic theme of the painting. Much of the composition is restrained and it does not let the viewer get distracted from the woeful state of the central subject. The broken lily flower indicates the incorporation of heavy symbolism in the image as in certain Christian traditions and European beliefs, a lily is associated with purity, innocence and virginity. The flower becomes a visual metaphor alluding towards the loss of innocence or a breakage in the moral compass. The painting is a fine example of 19th century Mexican genre painting and cements Ocaranza's status as a significant figure in Mexican art.