page_title: The House of Flowers (TV series)
section_title: Family portraits
hierarchical_section_title: The House of Flowers (TV series) / Production / Family portraits
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration from The Nursery "Alice", containing twenty coloured enlargements from Tenniel's illustrations to "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," with text adapted to nursery readers by Lewis Carroll. (London: Macmillan and Co. 1890) (Taken from British Library item Cup.410.g.74)
context_page_description: The House of Flowers is a Mexican black comedy-drama television series created by Manolo Caro for Netflix. It depicts a dysfunctional upper-class Mexican family that own a prestigious floristry shop and a struggling cabaret, both called 'The House of Flowers'. The series, almost entirely written and directed by its creator, stars Verónica Castro, Cecilia Suárez, Aislinn Derbez, Darío Yazbek Bernal, Arturo Ríos, Paco León, Juan Pablo Medina, Luis de la Rosa, María León, and Isela Vega.
  The 13-episode first season was released on August 10, 2018. A second and third season of the series were announced in October 2018; Verónica Castro had left the cast before the show was renewed and does not appear in later seasons. Season 2 premiered on October 18, 2019, and the final season was released on April 23, 2020. A short film special called The House of Flowers Presents: The Funeral premiered on November 1, 2019, and a YouTube TV special was released on April 20, 2020. The first season is exclusively set in Mexico, while the second and third seasons also feature scenes in Madrid, and the funeral special has a scene set at the Texas-Mexico border.
context_section_description: The large portraits of the de la Mora family that hang in the atrium of the house are used as plot points in the show, and versions of the artwork for each season are animated in their respective title sequences. The oil-on-canvas portraits were created by the Mexican-American surrealist painter Roberta Lobeira. The portrait for the first season is a work called Retrato de una familia normal (English: Portrait of a Normal Family), the art for the second season is called La vida después de ti (English: Life After You), and the portrait for the final season is called El final del cuento (English: The End of the Tale). Caro kept the third season's portrait and producer Rafael Ley kept the second season's, despite a collector wanting to buy it from them.
  Vogue's Eugenia González de Henn writes that the portraits contain elements of magical realism, a consistent theme in Lobeira's work. Lobeira has known Suárez "all [her] life" and had worked with Caro and Ley before, on the film No sé si cortarme las venas o dejármelas largas; she said that she had been told before the commission that they may ask to use some of her work in a Netflix show, and she was moved by this but did not understand the reach and power of the platform at the time. In terms of inspiration, Lobeira said that she "likes to follow a wave, that [she] gets caught up in a character and then expresses it in a magical world", and so she got to know the characters to "capture [their] essence": before she designed the first portrait, she was sent character descriptions and a synopsis of the story. She said that the third portrait is her favorite, because by the time she made it she already knew the characters very well and could take more inspiration from them, and because the poses were fun.
  With Retrato de una familia normal, González asserted that Lobeira "facilitated the illusion" of a perfect family but also revealed a double life; she notes the imagery of Paulina having blue blood and Virginia being dressed in gold with a crown, and Julián having a double face while Ernesto's is ripped in two. Lobeira said that the piece was inspired by Alice in Wonderland, and also pointed out that every character but Virginia is dressed in black. The portrait was her largest work at the time, measuring 1.9 m × 3 m (6.2 ft × 9.8 ft), and was completed in less than a month. Lobeira would work for up to sixteen hours a day on it. According to her, the image of Julián – intentionally in black and white – was the hardest to paint, because each reference photo she was sent of Yazbek Bernal had a different expression, while Ernesto was a challenge because Ríos had not yet been cast when she started work.
  Lobeira also had little time to work on the La vida después de ti portrait for the second season, and told Quién that Caro would often ask for things to be changed during the design of the portrait, which they worked on together. Some of the imagery in this portrait includes Paulina smoking a churro with planets coming out of the smoke – Lobeira says this reflects how the character "lives in another world" – and a book on the head of María José because of her position as a lawyer. It also shows Julián with a banner saying "Lust" and a puppet of Diego, and Paulina's chest has pills inside. The hardest part of the portrait was the image of Bruno and Rosita on a carousel, with the Rosita figure being about 3 cm (1.2 in) high. Within an hour of the new portrait being shared on social media by Netflix Latinoamérica it had been viewed over 6,000 times.
  The third season portrait, measuring 1.8 m × 2.8 m (5.9 ft × 9.2 ft), was also completed in about three weeks. Lobeira said that even though Caro was still a demanding partner, she managed to get her ideas through and planned all the details and the tones of the portrait. Caleb Torres García for Quién wrote that the imagery shows Paulina as the "matriarch and martyr" because she is positioned in the center and decorated like a saint. He also noted that it shows a pregnant Diego; María José with a mask of another woman; an elegant-looking
caption: Illustration by John Tenniel from The Nursery "Alice": the surrealist imagery of Alice in Wonderland inspired the family portrait.
exif: {"Image Copyright": "\u00a9The British Library Board"}