Views of San Antonio de Oriente constitute the main subjects, albeit not the only ones, in the paintings of José Antonio Velásquez. They do not contain any fantastic elements. The artist stuck to reality and built an inventory, stone by stone, tile by tile, tree by tree, animal by animal, and character by character, of everything that his eyes captured in this quiet Honduran colonial town, which had been forgotten by history after the closure of the silver mine for which it was built. This painting gives the viewer a glimpse of the world that comprises San Antonio de Oriente. On the left edge, peeking out of vegetation in the gray area, lies the mine. At the bottom of the painting, some residents talk or walk on a gravel road that leads to the town, while loose hens and a dog with a raised tail wander around. The road is enclosed by stone walls, behind which grazing cows stand. Two electricity poles cross the field diagonally and are the only elements alluding to modernity. The village is at the center of the composition. Its church, reddish-tiled roofs, and white walls are set, without friction, between richly vegetated hills in different shades of green with touches of orange, yellow, and purple, possibly that of jacarandas in bloom. Overall, the painting gives the impression of a choral world without contrasts, where men and women, animals, and nature coexist in harmony, as if San Antonio de Oriente were a kind of historically realized Eden, a view to which the artist strongly adheres. A barber, telegrapher, and painter, José Antonio Velásquez was born into a humble family in the city of Caridad, Honduras. He began showing an interest in art at an early age, but did not receive any type of formal training. He was always guided by his instinct. In 1930 he arrived in San Antonio de Oriente, a small colonial village twenty-five miles from Tegucigalpa, to work as a telegrapher and lived there for thirty years. This quiet and almost forgotten town became the main source of inspiration for and subject of his paintings. At first, he only created drawings, but toward 1933 he began using oils to depict the cobble streets, the reddish-tiled roofs, and the white walls of the houses, the church, the animals, the residents, the vegetation, and the surrounding hills. He painted San Antonio countless times from different angles, always with the attention and fidelity of a meticulous reporter. In the beginning, his compositions consisted of rigid lines and almost no alterations of light and color. However, over time and guided by his experience and instinct, his works began to gain life and fluidity. His popularity started to grow during the fifties when he took a job as a barber at the Escuela Agrícola Panamericana in El Zamorano, near San Antonio de Oriente. Wilson Popenoe, the American director of the school, saw his work and helped him sell it to American visitors. He officially gained recognition as one of the masters of Latin American “naïve” painting, largely due to the work of Cuban art critic José Gómez Sicre, who was working at the Organization of American States at the time and was able to see, in the spontaneity of “primitive” art, a genuine expression of the soul of the people and an “unconscious” variation of modern art. In 1949 the critic included Velásquez in an inter-American exhibition that toured the Americas, helped him participate in the São Paulo Biennial, organized an individual exhibition at the OAS in 1954, and in 1974 made a documentary about his life and work. The artist also participated in the Hispano American Biennial in Madrid in 1951 and received the Pablo Zelaya Sierra National Art Prize in 1955. Six years later, once he had already become a renowned artist in his country, he moved to Tegucigalpa, where he passed away in 1983.