The Iklé Watercolors
From the collection of the Museum of International Folk Art
Gift of Frank and Maurine Iklé
Curated by Barbara Mauldin, PhD
Photography by Blair Clark

These eleven watercolors depict in delicate detail the variety in class and ethnicity of nineteenth-century Lima, Peru. They are examples of costumbrismo paintings, depicting varied customs and activities of daily life, which were popular in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, as reports and souvenirs of distant cultures. Costumbrismo work by Peruvian artists circulated around the world, including to Canton, China where unknown artists copied it for the international market. The Iklé watercolors are examples of that Chinese work. Barbara Anderson, PhD, Director of Museum Resources in the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, tells their story in her essay, "From Lima to Canton and Back: Nineteenth-Century Watercolors for Peru," published in the Spring 2011 El Palacio (Vol. 116, no. 1, pp. 44-51). She writes that "[t]he Iklé watercolors remind us that globalism was thriving long before the term was coined in this century."