Hernan Ponce Sanchez


Hernan Ponce Sanchez was born in 1917 in the small town of Concepción in the Mantaro Valley, in the central Andean highlands.

He died young at the age of 42, tragically only months after his marriage to his long time sweetheart Esther Rivera.

In 1936 He enrolled at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, where Sabogal, one of Peru’s most renowned artists of the time was to be his tutor.

At art school, Hernan studied with another youngster from the highlands, Pedro Rojas Ponce, 




Together the two young artists, who were to become lifelong friends, accompanied Tello's expeditions all over Peru documenting and illustrating the team's discoveries.

Back in Lima, Hernan worked at the Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History on the Plaza Bolivar in Pueblo Libre, drawing and cataloguing the finds. 






Hernan was one of the founding members of a group of young artists el Grupo Waman Poma. Named after Waman Poma de Ayala, the group held their first exhibition of paintings and sculpture in 1945.





After retiring from the museum, he taught at the Colegio Winetka in Chaclacayo, and was also the deputy director of the adult education section of the Pedro Labarte School, one of the largest state schools in Lima.

Hernan also owned and managed an art supplies shop in the old Lima city centre. The shop was called Noa Noa after the paintings of Gauguin, who had lived in Peru for a brief time.



Like Julio C Tello himself, Hernan was a fervent educationalist, and 50 anécdotas del sabio Tello was written originally for schools, and published in 1957 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Julio C Tello.




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