Finding Damián Domingo’s Niña con perrito is definitely one of the most memorable episodes of my PhD journey, made possible by Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program, which swiftly provided the travel funds that allowed me to fly to Madrid.

It was only when I held the painting in my hands that the research, which until then had consisted largely of names, dates, catalogues, and journeys between archives, became unexpectedly personal. I found myself thinking of my daughter in Manila and of a photograph I had taken the previous year in Florence, when we stopped before Tiberio Titi’s portrait of the young Vittoria della Rovere with her little dog. My daughter stood beneath the painting while I photographed her, already conscious, as parents always are, that by the time I saw her again she would no longer look quite the same. I wonder now whether that moment was some kind of premonition.

I couldn’t bring myself near the work to hold it at first when the parchment was finally opened. I tried to contain myself before doing the physical examination and it was only after I had left the museum that my shoulder started to drop from jetlag and exhaustion of back-to-back transcontinental travel.

Domingo’s painting also moved me with the thought that, across nearly two centuries, it could still preserve something of a parent’s pride and the impossible desire to keep a child from changing. Domingo channeled the niña’s parents intention with the loving attention perhaps only a father could give, in the girl’s dress and ribbons, the little dog beside her, and the Philippine landscape carefully preserved behind them.

Forgive me for expressing some pride in this moment, but I felt as though I had been searching for this painting long before I knew it existed, because so much of what I have been doing these past years has involved tracing connections across distances which is, in the end, what ivory paintings are about. As an art historian, I have come to sense the passage of time in dog years. In my thirties, I already feel as though I have lived for almost two centuries.