Four studies of Filipinos: Two mestizas and a mestizo going to Mass; Two mestizas and a mestizo by a font; Street vendors selling bread and milk; and Street vendors

Lozano was born in Manila and was active as a painter in the 1840s. He was remarked on as 'a watercolourist without rival' by a local commentator Rafael Diaz Arenas as early as 1850. A number of his early commissions in the 1840s and 1850s show him as a practitioner of the unusual art form known as letres y figuras in which a patron's name is composed by elaborate arrangements of figures (tipos del Pais) surrounded by vignettes of scenes in Manila. He also produced more conventional studies of local types and costumes, as with the letres y figuras, to supply the demand for souvenirs of the then exotic Manila for visiting traders and government officials. He is also recorded as working in oils and was commissioned by the Spanish government to depict episodes from the history of the colony to be displayed during the fiesta in the district of Santa Cruz in Manila in 1848. His work, encompassing letres y figuras, tipos del Pais, landscapes and genre has marked him out as an important transitional figure between the miniaturist art of Damian Domingo and Justiniano Asuncion and the fully-fledged genre paintings of Lorenzo Guerrero and Felipe Rojas.

These four fine and large sheets depict Filipino types ranging from the mestizos and mestizas (the locals of mixed Spanish, Chinese and Filipino descent) shown in their celebrated formal dress -- the woman in the traditional pares with the addition of a veil and the man's dress including a fine transparent embroidered shirt over an undershirt, holding a cane and bowler hat (from England) -- to the humble street vendors here including, amongst others, the milksellers (the man carrying a bamboo pitcher hung on a stick over his shoulder, the woman bearing a pitcher on her head) and a breadseller from the Jolo bakery (bread was introduced to the Philippines by the Chinese).