It is significant to note that like his landscapes and genre works, most of Amorsolo's historical paintings are quiet and peaceful. Amorsolo rarely painted highly emotional or depressing scenes from his imagination. Amorsolo seemed to avoid bloody scenes of battle or even executions that are the staple in accounts of the Philippine ReVolution and the Filipino-American War. This was a task undertaken by Amorsolo's best friend, Guillermo Tolentino, whose monument to Andres Bonifacio in Caloocan, completed in 1933, is a three-dimensional tableau of the revolution from the execution of Gotnez, Burgos, and Zamora to Bonifacio. In 1960 Carlos V. Francisco painted a large canvas depicting the execution of Rizal that now adorns the Rizal Shrine In Fort Santiago. Larger historical sweep was achieved by Francisco in the mural lining the session hall of Manila City Hall known as Filipino Struggles Through History (1964). This complex painting expresses a linear history starting with Soliman to the Japanese occupation.

Except when he painted the horrors of the Second World War, Amorsolo avoided bloody scenes of battle, Perhaps the most violent historical painting he ever made is the lackluster Assassination of Governor Bustamante whose composition was largely based on a painting of the same title and subject by Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo. There is but a hint of the Philippine Revolution, the struggle against Spain and the United States in the widely reproduced painting Making of the Philippine Flag, This canvas has become the pattern for later depictions by other artists of the sewing of the first Philippine flag in Hongkohg in 1898, All three women in this painting are typical Amorsolo women: brown, beautiful, and young. Not one bears any resemblance to the three historical women: Marcela Agoncillo, her daughter Lorenza, and Delfina Herbosa de Natividad, a niece of Rizal, who made the first flag.

There are different explanations for Amorsolo's historical viewpoint: Was this due to his gentle disposition? Was this the interpretation of history he was comfortable with? Was he painting a version of history (usually on the early encounter between the Philippines and Spain in the 16th century) that was stipulated by the patron or commission? Maybe Amorsolo was so horrified by the experience of surviving the Second World War that he could not paint blood, gore and destruction? Amorsolo's best historical paintings did not come from his imagination but were drawn from life, based on his personal experiences during the dark days of the Japanese occupation and the Battle for Manila in 1945, Amorsolo left us a visual record of the violence and destruction of this period in numerous sketchbooks and canvases which, due to their depressing nature, are not to be found in the living rooms of art collectors, One or two of his paintings on the Burning of Manila is even believed to be jinxed.

Even the historical viewpoint in these paintings is very clear. He curses the Japanese in his drawings and gave his paintings titles like La destruccion de Manila por los salvajes japoneses (The Destruction of Manila by the Savage Japanese). Human sorrow and suffering are captured in canvases showing women mourning their dead husbands, files of people with pushcarts and makeshift bags leaving a dark burning city tinged with red from fire and blood, One dramatic canvas has two figures huddled in a corner, the man is shown defiant in a last-ditch effort to defend his wife or daughter from rape or execution by Japanese who are not even shown on the canvas. Amorsolo was at his best when he was drawing or painting from life, from memory, from experience, His war-time paintings and drawings, which were undertaken as a personal record of the time, have come down to us today as his authentic historical paintings.

When viewed with 21st-century hindsight, Amorsolo's historical paintings obviously fall short of expectations. Thus, the art historian must grant Amorsolo artistic license and place the works in the context of the times. Amorsolo was born in 1892 and spent his childhood in the pastoral landscape of Daet, Camarines, far away from the eye of the storm that was the Philippine Revolution and the Filipino-American War.

By the time Amorsolo returned to Manila and made a living as a painter and teacher in the first decades of the American colonial period he worked in the midst of a country undergoing socio-political and cultural ferment. English was fast replacing Spanish as the lingua franca in government and education. American moving pictures, music, literature, and sports replaced other pastimes in the Spanish period. Even in politics, the Republican ideals of Rizal and the Philippine Revolution may have been suppressed but lived in the hearts of Filipinos who refused to accept the American claim that Filipinos were incapable of self government. Amorsolo, a hispanized Filipino, was at the crossroads of a rapidly changing physical and cultural landscape. Amorsolo's historical paintings that extolled the Spanish and Roman Catholic landmarks in Philippine history could be seen as a way of coping with a rapidly changing physical and cultural landscape. His paintings of an idealized pre-Spanish civilization and the romantic pastoral scenes reflected his time, the historical period, before the war, a time remembered fondly by Filipinos as pistaym or "Peace time."

Amorsolo's canvases give us much more than a dated visual historiography. To fully appreciate these historical paintings we have to go beyond the form and detail to see in them the delicate balance between history and imagination. In all historical paintings from Juan Luna to Fernando Amorsolo's we not only get a glimpse of what the artist read, what the artist thought, and what the artist imagined about the history of the Philippines and the Filipinos. Their canvases are important as reflections of a people continuously in search of their identity. These paintings are a visual record of the changing interpretation of Philippine history.