It was sold for "two packs of cigarettes" in 1949. The first painting of "Botero" to be auctioned in Bogotá

Colombian auction house Bogotá Auctions has announced the launch of the rare watercolor painting "La Plegaria", completed in 1949 by the late international painter and sculptor Fernando Botero, in an official auction to be held tomorrow, Thursday, May 21.

The painting was the first piece of art Botero sold early in his career, trading it for just two packs of cigarettes, and is now on display on the global art market nearly three years after his death (he died in 2023 at the age of 91), and is on display alongside more than 120 works by prominent artists from Colombia and Latin America.

Features of the formative painting and the political dimension

Bogotá Auctions explained in its technical report that the watercolor dates back to the early formative stage of the famous Colombian painter when he was a teenager at the age of 17, as his artistic approach based on mass, size and exaggeration of dimensions that characterized his visual identity and later global fame had not yet crystallized. The painting depicts an elderly peasant praying with humble features and intertwined hands, behind which a woman is seen holding a child and looking up at the sky with fearful and terrified eyes.

The company said that Botero painted the painting just one year after the assassination of Colombian liberal leader Jorge Elither Gaitán in 1948, a historic event that sparked a violent wave of political unrest in the country.

The paradox of barter and the accompanying auction business

According to the Maison's art records, Botero traded his painting in his youth for two packs of cigarettes with Efrín Ossa, a pioneer of Colombian insurance law, in a chronological paradox that reveals the vast difference between that modest exchange and the million-dollar market value that Botero's work later reached in the international art market.

 The  auction will  also include another Botero oil painting titled "Niña con flores" (Girl with Flowers) dating back to 1960 and depicting his transitional phase, as well as a collection of contemporary artworks by Latin art giants such as Alejandro Obregón, Deborah Arango, Beatrice Guenthaleth, Luis Caballero, Ana Mercedes Hoyos and Oscar Muñoz.