In June 1951 an enterprising photographer displayed 25 works in his studio in Bogotd including watercolors, drawings and oil paintings by a young, unknown artist, who had only recently arrived in the capital from the provinces. His success on this occasion was modest, but not discouraging. Not quite one year later, Leo Matiz - for that was the photographer's name - held another exhibition of the same artist's work. This time with resounding success, for all the works were sold. Not one of those involved at the time, neither the amateur art dealer nor the artist nor the buyers, could have had any idea that the 19-year-old Fernando Botero from Medellin would one day be Latin America's most famous painter. At the time, though, there was nothing to indicate any such development. His pictures were so heterogeneous that visitors thought at first that it was a group exhibition. The gamut of influences evinced by those first pictures ranged from Paul Gauguin to the Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Jose1 Clemente Orozco. But the young autodidact from the city in the Andes had never seen original works by these or any other artists. His knowledge of painting derived entirely from books and reproductions. His father, like most South Americans an enthusiast for the French Revolution, owned books with portraits of Madame de Pompadour, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Dante's Divine Comedy illustrated by Gustave Dore' also had a place in the bookshelves of the young artist's late father. It was here too that little Fernando saw his first nudes. Quite different were the pictures that adorned his school exercise-books - Raphael's Sistine Madonna, for example, or Titian's Assunta, altogether magical Madonnas, not remotely comparable to the "virgenes" in the churches of Medellin. And finally there was the hall of a friend's house, where the young man never failed to be impressed by a reproduction of Picasso's Woman in Front of a Mirror and another of a picture by Giorgio de Chirico.