Rivera spent the tumultuous years of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) painting and traveling abroad. Upon returning to his native country in 1921, he celebrated Mexican traditions and indigenous people, making them a central subject of his work. As he later recalled,
My return home aroused in me an aesthetic joy impossible to describe. Everywhere I saw a potential masterpiece: in the crowds, the markets, the festivals, the marching battalions, the workers in the workshops, the fields, in every shining face, in every radiant child.
This painting, depicting a flower festival held on Good Friday in a town then called Santa Anita, was included in a solo exhibition of Rivera’s work at MoMA in 1931. Only the second artist, after Matisse , to receive this honor, Rivera was, by the time, an international celebrity: the New York Sun hailed him as “the most talked-about artist this side of the Atlantic.”