Botero's Most Underrated Paintings, Ranked by Hidden Depth

Feature image: Fernando Botero, La carta, 1976; Banco de la República, 2000, Photograph by Víctor Robledo, © Museo Botero - Banco de la República via Google Arts & Culture

All reproduced images are cropped from the frames in which they were originally photographed.

Fernando Botero built a career, and eventually a signature style, on volume. Bullfighters, dancers, presidents, and housewives alike swelled into the rounded, inflated figures that earned the name Boterismo. Across roughly seven decades and several thousand paintings, drawings, and sculptures, most of them still uncatalogued into a single official count, that reputation crowded out a wide range of subjects that never made it into the popular imagination. Still lifes, rural genre scenes, and portraits of private grief sit in museum collections in Bogotá and Buenos Aires without the recognition his bullfighters and matrons get. Here we rank Botero's lesser-known works, each one carrying a piece of history, personal or national, that its surface rarely gives away.

Botero's still lifes rarely get mentioned alongside his figures, even though he returned to the genre across his entire career. Naturaleza muerta con helado (Still Life with Ice Cream) depicts a scoop of ice cream in the same swollen, sculptural mass he gave his human subjects, suggesting that Boterismo treated volume itself rather than commenting on body size. Botero's sculptures of fruit and household objects circulate widely today, but the paintings that established the idea first tend to go unseen. Still Life with Ice Cream is an early, clear example of him applying the same exaggerated weight to foods as he did to a general or a dictator, making it a useful entry point into what Boterismo was actually doing.

Painted the same year as several of Botero's more dramatic history paintings, Naturaleza muerta con libros (Still Life with Books) sits at the quieter end of his output. Botero studied the old masters directly, spending time in Madrid in front of Velázquez and Goya and in Florence absorbing Titian, Giotto, and Botticelli, and his still lifes carry that education more plainly than his figure paintings do. A stack of books rendered with the same rounded gravity as his people turns a genre normally associated with restraint into another site for his signature distortion. The Banco de la República donation gave Bogotá the largest concentration of Botero's work anywhere, and pieces like this one, without a dictator or a bullfighter to draw a crowd, are the ones that get walked past.

Botero spent much of his career painting daily life in Colombia from memory, working in Paris and later Tuscany while reconstructing towns and rivers he had left behind. Caminando cerca al río (Walking Near the River) is part of that body of work, but the composition sets it apart from almost everything else on his catalog. The figure is pushed far into the distance, reduced to a small silhouette against the landscape, while the river, its reflections, and the surrounding terrain take up most of the canvas. Boterismo depends on scale and proximity, a body filling the frame, and this painting withholds both.

Family groupings appear throughout Botero's career, often doubling as commentary on Colombian domestic and social structures. Una familia (A Family), painted the same year as Walking Near the River, renders its subjects with the stiff, formal posing of a studio portrait, a composition type Botero returned to often enough that art historians treat it as its own recurring subject within his catalog.

The painting's flat expression, common across Botero's family scenes, tends to read as detachment rather than satire, which separates it from the more overtly political works taught in survey courses. It is a quieter register of the same interest in Colombian social life that drives his more famous political paintings, without the caricature that made those paintings famous.

On the morning of March 31, 1983, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake struck Popayán, a colonial city in southwestern Colombia renowned for its preserved Spanish architecture. The quake lasted well under a minute but killed 267 people, injured thousands more, and destroyed much of a city that had already been leveled by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions twice before in its history. Botero painted the aftermath more than fifteen years later in Terremoto en Popayán (Earthquake in Popayán), tilting Popayán's colonial buildings into the same distorted, unstable volume he gave his human figures, turning architectural devastation into a subject fit for Boterismo.

It is one of the only entries on this list tied to a specific, documented historical event rather than a private or invented scene, which makes its obscurity harder to explain. Botero painted political violence and public tragedy throughout his career, from Pablo Escobar's death to the Abu Ghraib series, and Earthquake in Popayán belongs in that lineage even though it rarely gets mentioned alongside those better-known works.

According to Laura Zarta, head of art curatorship at the Banco de la República, this watercolor connects directly back to Botero's early engagement with Mexico, where he lived and worked in the 1950s and absorbed the country's folk traditions firsthand. The grinning skeleton strumming a guitar echoes a specific earlier painting, Mandolin on a Chair (1957), and the guitar itself nods to a central instrument in Mexican folk music. Zarta has described the piece as one that radiates warmth despite its subject, a skeleton that reads as joyful rather than morbid.

That reading sets La muerte tocando guitarra (Death Playing Guitar) apart from the European danse macabre tradition it superficially resembles. Botero was folding a Mexican folk sensibility into a subject that, anywhere else, would read as pure mortality. It is one of the more fully documented works on this list, backed by direct curatorial attribution, and still one of the least discussed.

El viudo (The Widower), held at MALBA in Buenos Aires, is the most thoroughly analyzed painting on this list and arguably the strongest case for Botero as a serious narrative painter rather than a stylist of volume alone. MALBA's own curatorial reading ties the painting directly to the Latin American Boom in literature, placing Botero alongside Gabriel García Márquez in a shared interest in irony, the violence embedded in everyday Latin American life, and religion as the backbone of a rigid, macho society. The scene shows a father tending an altar built for his dead wife, her youthful image, a candle, a rosary, while every figure in the room, including the family dog, wears the same exaggerated, tearful expression.

The painting works as tragicomedy rather than straightforward grief. Botero renders a father clumsily performing a maternal role a patriarchal society never prepared him for, and the humor sits directly on top of real loss rather than replacing it. Love and death, the two themes running through the Boom novelists Botero is compared to here, meet in a single domestic scene, making The Widower the closest thing on this list to a literary painting, and the most underrated entry Botero ever produced.

Boterismo never needed a bullfighter or a dictator to make its point. A grieving father, a flooded colonial city, a grinning skeleton with a guitar, all of them prove that volume was Botero's real subject all along, applied wherever he found something worth distorting.

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