On a day as special as he is 25 of May, It is always worth remembering those people who made history and marked their legacy in our country with fire..

Within that context and from the field of culture, it is good to mention the valuable contribution of the French artist Léonie Matthis, responsible for being the only artist who signed the collection of the Museo del Cabildo y la Revolución de Mayo.

We are talking about the work "May 25, 1810", the painting that represents and that also adheres as a historical record of the mobilization of the people of Buenos Aires towards the Cabildo on the morning of the Revolution

Born in the French city of Troyes in 1883, Matthis graduated from 15 years of the School of Fine Arts in Paris. It should be added that in 1904 -and for the first time- the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris admitted female academics and Léonie Matthis was one of them.

Before your arrival in Buenos Aires, The artist married the Asturian portraitist Franciso Villar. Once installed in our country, Matthis won the first single prize for foreigners at the National Hall, in 1919.

As reported in its article by the Museum of the Cabildo and the May Revolution, in the decade of 1920 started a line of historical paintings, characteristic for its series. In 1936 on the occasion of the IV Centenary of the Buenos Aires Foundation, he produced the first series of thirteen great paintings entitled “History of the Homeland through the Plaza de Mayo” commissioned by Oscar Carbone and María Luisa del Pino.

The series was exhibited that year at the Franco Inglesa Pharmacy. In the sixties, at a public auction, It is acquired by the Museum of the City of Buenos Aires Brigadier Cornelio Saavedra, where it remains exposed.

As for the technique he used in his creations, Léonie Matthis used her watercolor using an oil-like form called gouache.

The artist made layers, using brushstrokes with opaque watercolor and then captured the light colors and highlights with white.

In this way, when drying, the colors offered a light shade with an opaline look. Warm colors prevailed in his palette, clear and bright, with lines that reflected a landscape of movement and life.

Beyond its versatility when creating, Matthis resorted to the advice of figures from a circle of intellectual sociability for his realization of historical paintings. Among them were the historians Ricardo Levene and Enrique Udaondo, the writer Leopoldo Lugones, Mario Buschiazzo and the priest Guillermo Furlong, among others. It was also documented in museums, archives and collections and reading history books and travelers' stories, to make his work a retrospective journey.

Beyond this detail, He did not take his work as historical documentation and always referred to the recreation of the past in terms of evocation or dreaming. Later, Léonie Matthis moved away from the pictorial style of the Centennial and from the portrayal of the heroes.