A group of 16 tipos del pais watercolor paintings has been found by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London among its collection. While it was among the earliest works from the Philippines to enter the museum, it was only discovered and catalogued in 2025, as revealed by Cristina Juan in a featured exhibit, Everyday Satire: A Newly Found Tipos del País from 19th Century Manila at Mapping Philippine Material Culture, an open-access digital repository on Philippine Studies, where Juan is the principal investigator and main editor.
Juan discusses the significance of the newly found tipos del pais, especially its white and red versions and the presence of Tagalog verses in the images. Attributed to an unnamed “native artist,” the 16 individual pieces listed as “Costumes of Manila” have watermarks and register entries between 1840s and 1850s.
What is extraordinary in this newly discovered set is that rhymed Tagalog verses accompany the images, described as “playful verse narratives” that are “witty and ironic.” In general, tipos del pais paintings do not contain any text and painted on uncolored paper.
Eight scenes
The set is composed of eight scenes, in two versions, white and red. The white version is hand painted on British white wove paper with watermark; the other set is on white-core sheets dyed red on the surface and uses slightly different pigments and application techniques.
The eight scenes include 1) a man reading, The Secret Student Lover; 2) a man with a top hat and cane, The Swaggering Dandy; 3) a man with a rooster, The Cockfighter; 5) a man with a parasol, Concerned Parent; 6) Two children, Fabia the Student; 7) a woman preparing betelnut, The Dismay of a Market Woman; 8) a woman jeweler, The Commission.
The verses
Written in mid-19th century Tagalog orthography with Spanish spellings, the rhymed Tagalog verses are similar to folk Tagalog short verse forms popular in the 17thand 18th centuries.
All the poems, except one, are spoken in the first person, a monologue of inner musings and sentiments on life, relationships, and personal circumstances.
The betelnut seller muses on the scarcity of customers and profit amidst her desire for fine clothes; the cockfighter is energized by his winnings, ready for the next cockfight in San Lazaro; a lady jeweler refuses to be hurried by an impatient customer who does not have enough money to secure a piece.
In effect, the verses make each character in the paintings alive and relatable as they “speak for themselves” with pride, complaint, or admonition or in “boastful, moralising, [or] humorous” tones.
OOTD, 19th c.
Photography was still unknown; it would become more widespread in Manila by the 1860s.
A popular painting genre in 19th century Manila, tipos del pais ( “country types” ) refers to miniature watercolor images of local inhabitants in their everyday attires that reflect their social status and occupation. Miniature paintings were in demand by the rich and wealthy as souvenirs or remembrances.
Of limited distribution, wealthy travelers, merchants, and elite Filipino families collected tipos del pais; textile merchants who did business in the Philippines used them as visual catalogues.
The main painters of tipos del pais include Damian Domingo (ca.1796-1834), Jose Honorato Lozano (1821-1885), and Justiniano Asuncion (1816-1901).
Considered as the Father of Philippine Painting, Damian Domingo made miniature paintings of young women in the early 19th century and painted portraits of Spanish governors, officials, and prominent figures.
None of Domingo’s paintings survived except for three paintings in Alfonso T. Ongpin’s possession and two albums of watercolors found in two London bookshops after World War 2.\
Albums
To date, several tipos del pais albums exist, attributed or misattributed to Damian Domingo: three are in the Philippines: the Paulino Que Collection, the Ayala Album reclassified by the Ayala Museum as from Domingo’s workshop; and the Eleuterio Pascual Album. Two albums are in the United States: the Ayer Collection at the Newberry Library, the only known version attributed to Domingo and signed in Damian Domingo’s name, and the albums at the New York Public Library mostly made by Justiniani Asuncion, Domingo’s pupil.
The fifth album and the only collection of tipos del pais in Europe is at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Manila Album of 30 watercolors painted with gouache on pith paper. Acquired in 1984, it is a collection of attires or “costumes” from Manila and other provinces for “Don Rafael Baboom,” a misspelling of Rafael Daniel Babon, an Indian-Armenian textile merchant who commissioned Damian Domingo to paint albums of costumes, reflecting the fashion of the time and people’s occupation.
Florina H. Capistrano Baker, museum curator and author of books on Philippine gold and the transpacific visual culture of the Philippines, has concluded that Chinese artists made the V&A Manila Album based on the Philippine original at the Newberry Library’s Ayer Collection in her comparative analysis of tipos del pais albums in the Philippines, United States, and Europe.
The recently discovered tipos del pais album with Tagalog verses in red and white versions has joined the Manila Album at the V&A Museum.
