May 29, 2025
MANILA – Walk through any major art museum’s historical galleries and you’ll likely encounter paintings created with egg tempera, particularly among Christian icons and medieval masterpieces.
This ancient medium, which uses egg yolk as a binder for pigments, dominated European art through the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance period. Think Botticelli’s spectacular “Birth of Venus,” Fra Filippo Lippi’s painted works on wood, Michelangelo’s early panel paintings, or Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel. Many of the altarpieces gracing European cathedrals were also crafted using this technique.
Until the 1500s, when oil painting emerged as the preferred medium, egg tempera reigned supreme. Today, few artists dare to master its demanding process.
READ: This 2025, The Spectacular Mid-Year Auction of Leon Gallery highlights legacy on the block
Lot 30. Anita Magsaysay-Ho, “Water Carriers/Taga-igib” signed and dated 1947 (lower left) egg tempera on board 24 x 17 in. PHOTO: PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER
It comes as even more of a surprise that Filipina modernist Anita Magsaysay-Ho chose to explore and eventually master the medium. During her precocious years as an art student, she revived the age-old technique and created works of such incandescent beauty.
“The egg tempera works of Anita Magsaysay-Ho are the stuff of legend, elusive and rare, but also luminous and unforgettably beautiful,” writes Lisa Guerrero Nakpil in the auction catalog.
Now, one of these rare treasures, “Water Carriers,” is on the block in Leon Gallery’s The Spectacular Midyear Auction 2025.
The modernist pioneer Anita Magsaysay-Ho
Magsaysay-Ho stands as one of the Philippines’ first modernist painters and, notably, one of the few women to achieve this distinction in her era.
She initially studied at the University of the Philippines under renowned classical painters Fernando Amorsolo and Fabian de la Rosa. Rather than following their realist tradition, she took to her unique modernist style with her rhythmic stylization and earthy color palette of forms and figures.
After World War II, the budding artist traveled to the United States, first studying at the Art Students League of New York. But it was at her next destination, the top-ranking art school Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where she would discover her calling with egg tempera.
Known for its intense studio-based curriculum and mentoring by artists-in-residence, the school boasts notable alumni including National Artist Jose Joya, Florence Knoll, and Charles and Ray Eames.
In the idyllic school grounds surrounded by gardens, fountains, and sculptures, she began to learn to paint using the egg tempera medium, guided by her mentor, head of the painting department Zoltan Sepeshy.
She then created “Water Carriers,” the artwork on the block at Leon Gallery’s The Spectacular Midyear Auction, only the third-ever egg tempera painting she created.
One of the most well-known photographs of the artist even shows the painting in progress in the background, adding to the provenance.
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The alchemy of egg tempera
Creating art with egg tempera demands extraordinary patience as well as technical skill.
In her existing notes, Magsaysay-Ho documents her process meticulously, beginning with the painstaking creation of the underpainting. She would then mix five distinct values for each color, combining egg yolk with water and stirring in various blacks and blues to achieve her desired effects.
“She would also prescribe the brushes needed—from fine sable to those for house paint—also rags and sponges, razor blades and sand paper. The cross-hatchings and striations add delicate textures and depth. It was a mysterious alchemy,” Guerrero Nakpil writes, “but instead of changing ordinary metal to gold, Anita would change egg yolks into magical works of art.”
Unlike oil paints, which remain workable for hours or even days, egg tempera dries within minutes, requiring artists to work in small sections with decisive, confident strokes. The medium’s unforgiving nature means there’s little room for error, and each mark must be precise.
Yet this same quality creates egg tempera’s characteristic luminosity, as layers of translucent color build upon one another to create an almost ethereal glow.
“Water Carriers”
Only her third egg tempera artwork, Magsaysay-Ho’s “Water Carriers” represents the full flowering of her technical mastery and artistic vision.
Under Sepeshy’s guidance, she rendered figures with arms curved like strong tree limbs, supple yet unyielding, as they balanced great clay jars of water upon their heads.
In the foreground, a man bare to the waist, readies tin cans strung to a branch, a makeshift yoke pressed to sunburned shoulders. Nearby, a woman leans into the cool shadow of a well, drawing water with the quiet strength of ritual.
Beyond them, thatched roofs rise, while trees and a fence frame the scene in ochres and umbers, of parched earth and a sort of daily grace of water carriers.
As Magsaysay-Ho would later recall in her memoirs, the academy was not just where she first stirred pigment into egg yolk, but where she first started painting women, a subject which was to become distinct to her practice.
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After painting “Water Carriers” at Cranbrook, Magsaysay-Ho’s early days with egg tempera were cut short.
After her first year at the school, love swept the artist off her feet with a swift engagement to businessman Robert Ho. After a whirlwind wedding in San Francisco came a pause in her formative season. It was only after returning to Manila that Magsaysay-Ho resumed her egg tempera practice.
Today, Magsaysay-Ho’s egg tempera paintings remain extraordinarily rare, making each surviving work a window into a moment in both Philippine art history and the revival of an ancient medium.
Installation of “Material Inspirations: Anita Magsaysay-Ho And Nena Saguil” in 2024. PHOTO: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF MANILA/ PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER
The recent exhibit in late 2024, “Material Inspirations: Anita Magsaysay-Ho and Nena Saguil” at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, curated by Patrick Flores, spotlighted Magsaysay-Ho’s egg tempera works, underscoring her distinct sensitivity to materials and the continued relevance of her art today.
In an era when most artists had long abandoned egg tempera for more forgiving materials, Magsaysay-Ho’s commitment to the demanding technique speaks to her technical ambition and hints at a deep respect for art’s historical traditions.
The appearance of “Water Carriers” at Leon Gallery’s 2025 The Spectacular Midyear Auction offers up an opportunity as rare as the Renaissance-inspired work itself, reminding why these egg tempera works of Magsaysay-Ho have truly become the stuff of legend.