In this article, journalist Fidel Cano, founder of the newspaper El Espectador (in circulation in Medellín since 1887) writes enthusiastically about Horizontes [Horizons], an oil painting that Francisco Antonio Cano had made in Bogotá; the work was exhibited at the Museo de Antioquia in 1913. Cano uses a literary style to describe each of the three figures in the painting, members of a family that has taken a break during a journey. According to the journalist, the father, mother, and cradled baby convey deep feeling, and the landscape in the background is so steeped in “the truth of the region” that anyone who looks at it will feel that he is breathing the local air. It is Cano’s wish for the image of this “holy family” to be present in every house in the Antioquia region since it is “the living depiction of each home” and the “faithful emblem of the beloved ‘small homeland.’”

Painter Francisco Antonio Cano (1865–1935) settled in Bogotá in 1911, where he helped found the Instituto de Bellas Artes. After efforts to establish himself as an artist in Medellín, he began to work as an art critic, promoting exhibitions and building a faithful group of students and other followers.

It was in Bogotá that he made what would prove to be his most important work on the settlement of western Colombia by entrepreneurs from the Antioquia region. This conflictive process, which facilitated the expansion of agriculture, was described by artist and businessman Alejandro López (1876–1940) as the clash “between the axe and the legal seal.” 

This text by journalist Fidel Cano (1854–1919) shows how an image that would become emblematic of the Department of Antioquia was interpreted by the elite at the time. Cano compares the work to the Christian symbolism of the Holy Family while also addressing the specific realities it represents in an attempt to find a moral lesson in the painting. The painter Cano gave the original version of Horizontes to his friend Carlos E. Restrepo (1867–1937)—president of Colombia from 1910 to 1914—who helped him during his early years in Bogotá. Restrepo’s heirs donated the work to the Museo de Antioquia, where it is currently housed.