The novels get the attention. The medical degree gets the admiration. The execution gets the reverence. Somewhere in the account of everything José Rizal was and did, the painter gets quietly left out.
This is partly a matter of survival. Most of his visual work is gone — lost in the destruction of Manila in 1945, scattered into private hands, or simply never preserved with the care given to his manuscripts. What remains is small in number but not in significance.
The few authenticated paintings and colored works that exist offer something the novels, the letters, and the essays cannot: Rizal looking at the world through a different set of eyes, choosing subjects for their personal rather than political meaning, and working in a medium that required patience, stillness, and the discipline of the hand rather than the mind.
He trained seriously. He was not a gentleman dabbler.
The Training
Rizal studied drawing and painting at the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura in Manila — the same institution that produced Juan Luna and Félix Hidalgo, the painters whose European prize-winning work Rizal would later celebrate in a famous toast in Madrid. He also trained under Romualdo de Jesus in Santa Cruz. When he enrolled at the University of Santo Tomas for medicine, his anatomy classes sharpened his draughtsmanship further. In Spain, at the Universidad Central de Madrid, he studied sculpture and drawing alongside his medical coursework.
He was, in short, taught by serious people and took the instruction seriously. By the time he arrived in Europe in his early twenties, he was sketching portraits, landscapes, and caricatures throughout his travels — not as a hobby but as a habit of attention.
The Works That Survive
What follows are the best-documented paintings and colored works attributed to Rizal — pieces confirmed through museum records, family provenance, and historical scholarship. For each one that survives, there are others we know only by description.
Portrait of Saturnina Rizal, oil on canvas, c. 1878
This is the one. Among all of Rizal’s paintings, the portrait of his eldest sister Saturnina — called Neneng within the family — is almost certainly his only surviving work in oil. He painted it at around seventeen years old.
Saturnina was, by most accounts, something closer to a second mother to Rizal than simply a sibling. She was the one who financially supported his education in Europe when the family’s resources were uncertain. She was the first to print a Tagalog translation of Noli Me Tangere, in 1909, thirteen years after his death. The portrait predates all of that — it is a young artist painting someone he loved, before either of them knew what the next two decades would bring.
The painting is currently held by Saturnina’s descendants and has been lent to the National Museum of Fine Arts in Manila, where it is featured in Gallery V — Inspiring the Nation, Dr. José Rizal: The National Hero in Art. It is worth seeing in person. Museum scholars describe it as technically accomplished for someone of his age: careful modeling, sensitivity to light, and a composed rendering of character.
Holy Week Backdrop, Dapitan Church, oil on canvas, 1894
While under house arrest in Dapitan, Rizal was asked by Fr. Vicente Balaguer to paint a large decorative curtain for the church’s Holy Week ceremonies. The result was an expansive colonnaded scene — architectural in its composition, devotional in its purpose, and made by a man who was simultaneously treating the sick, teaching schoolboys, and conducting scientific correspondence with European researchers.
It was preserved at the Ateneo museum after his death and destroyed during the Second World War. We know it existed from documentary records. We cannot see it.
Landscapes on Mother-of-Pearl Shells, oil, 1890s
Also from Dapitan: Rizal painted miniature landscapes on pairs of polished mother-of-pearl shells, which he gifted to Doña Leonor Valenzuela. The choice of surface is characteristic — he was always finding new materials to work with, treating the constraints of exile as an invitation to improvise. The shells passed to Doña Margarita Valenzuela and are believed to remain in private hands today, their precise location unrecorded.
Portrait of Miguel Morayta, crayon, 1885, Barcelona
Miguel Morayta was a Spanish historian and liberal intellectual who championed Filipino students in Spain at considerable personal political cost. Rizal admired him enough to draw his portrait during a stay in Barcelona. It is one of several crayon portraits Rizal made of the Europeans who shaped his thinking — a practice that suggests he was looking carefully at the people around him, trying to understand them through the act of rendering them.
The portrait is documented in biographical sources but its current location is not recorded in public museum listings.
Devotional Studies: Christ Crucified and Immaculate Conception, crayon, 1874–1875
Two early works made when Rizal was thirteen and fourteen, products of the intensely Catholic educational environment of his childhood. They show a precocious command of proportion and shading — the anatomy classes were still years away, which makes the draftsmanship more impressive. Neither has a documented public location today.
Allegory on Porcelain Vases, oil, Berlin, 1886
While studying in Berlin, Rizal decorated a pair of porcelain vases with a New Year allegory. Berlin was where he also finished writing Noli Me Tangere and began corresponding with Rudolf Virchow. The vases, like most of his small-scale decorative work, have no recorded public location.
Why So Little Survived
The short answer is the Liberation of Manila in 1945. The battle for the city destroyed an enormous portion of the Philippine cultural record — manuscripts, correspondence, artworks, and personal effects held in homes, churches, and institutions that did not survive the fighting. Much of Rizal’s juvenile output was kept in family homes. Many of his gifts — the shell paintings, the decorated objects — stayed in private collections that were never catalogued and were dispersed or lost over generations.
The survival of the Saturnina portrait is something of a small miracle, and its continued care by the family before it reached the museum is the reason it still exists.
Where to See His Art Today
The National Museum of Fine Arts in Manila is the primary public destination. Gallery V houses the Rizal exhibition on a rotating basis — the Saturnina portrait has been displayed there and continues to be the centerpiece of the collection. Schedules change, so it is worth confirming before visiting.
The Museo ni José Rizal at Fort Santiago in Intramuros holds manuscripts, memorabilia, and related materials, and is the site most associated with his final imprisonment. It is the closest thing to an immersive encounter with the physical record of his life.
What the Paintings Tell Us That the Writing Cannot
Rizal’s novels are extraordinarily visual — their scenes are staged with a painter’s eye, their characters rendered with the kind of descriptive precision that comes from someone who has spent years learning to look. The connection is not incidental. The discipline of drawing — of sitting with a subject long enough to understand its structure and render it faithfully — is the same discipline that runs through his fiction.
But the paintings also reveal something else. They are personal in a way that most of his writing is not. The portrait of Saturnina was not made for an audience. The shell landscapes were gifts, not statements. The devotional studies were a teenager practicing his faith and his craft at the same time. These works show Rizal at ease, looking at things he loved, making something for its own sake rather than for the movement or the cause or posterity.
That Rizal existed too. It is worth knowing he was there.
