I would not describe Damián Domingo’s Niña con perrito [Girl with a puppy, a miniature poodle] as a discovery in the strict sense. The ivory miniature was already known by at least 2012, when it appeared in Madrid’s Museo del Romanticismo records on children’s portrait miniatures. To my knowledge, however, it has received little or no attention in Philippine art history.
There seems to be little doubt about the attribution. The miniature is signed and dated: “Damian Domingo lo pintó en Manª 1833” [Damián Domingo painted this in Manila in 1833], which corresponds to that on an earlier miniature, Retrato de muchacho (Rafael Enriquez Sequera), dated 1832 and now in the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas. The comparison with Domingo’s 1832 portrait of Rafael Enríquez Sequera is tempting. Both works are small gouache-on-ivory miniatures, signed by Domingo within a year of each other, and both portray elite children with the same delicate modeling, large eyes, and composed frontal presence. Since Rafael Enríquez Sequera belonged to a large family (three brothers and two sisters) it is possible that the unidentified girl in Niña con perrito came from the same family circle. While this remains a hypothesis, the resemblance of their features, however, may indicate kinship, but it may also reflect Domingo’s manner as a miniaturist and the conventions of elite child portraiture in Manila in the 1830s.