Drawing—the closer approach to the idea—is a central pedagogical axis for hand and vision training. Despite its importance, its structured teaching took a long time to arrive in Portugal, and, unlike in several other European countries, it was born in the heart of a museum.
It was in Oporto, that João Baptista Ribeiro (1790-1868), a royal painter, a great lover of drawing, and aware of its pedagogical value, convinced the future king D. Pedro IV to create a museum of paintings and prints in Invicta. Shortly after that, he was entrusted with organizing this institution (Porto Museum, embryo of what became the Soares dos Reis National Museum) to which Baptista Ribeiro was committed, and whose regulation established the pedagogical principles by which the institution should be guided. It will be in this informal school that the victorious liberals will be inspired. The creation of the Academies of Fine Arts of Lisbon and Porto finally arrived in 1836, marking the coordinates of artistic creation based on the knowledge and practice of drawing.
The MNAC collection hosts many works from this national academic tradition, which formed other artistic disciplines. After more than a century stored in the museum's reserves, these works were studied and prepared to be exhibited in 2020. The pandemic, however, forced its closure just over a month after its opening.
As we prepare to reopen the collection's long-term exhibition to the public, we could not fail to share once again these seminal works by many of the names in our art history, to which we add others, contemporaries – in a testimony to the way in which time, in art, folds and unfolds, with their own rules that each creator claims for themselves.
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THE ENCLOSED SPACE OF MELANCHOLY
António Faria creates designed forests, but his intentions are different. It explores a deep sadness through small gestures, in undulating and precise, unexpectedly creative strokes of small foliage, from a small branch that follows another to the intertwined and sensitive tangle. In the magical expression of a natural recollection, one senses the importance of melancholy and this disturbance or distortion of mood, in the sinuous lines of the trees, sometimes in immersive experiences, sometimes in the enclosed space of a room, aggravated by the reduced use of colors, in blues, blacks or vibrant reds.
Sousa Pinto, a Portuguese author by far, chose France as the enclosed space of his landscapes, in rural approaches, close to this meticulous pleasure, experienced in the detailed traces of the trees and brief and countless natural filaments.
A century-old temporal abbreviation brings together the technique of two artists, so different in their line. The freedom of António Faria's gesture contrasts with the rigor of João António Correia's drawing. In common, they treated the technique of passing on as the ultimate purpose of emotion. The front of the paper, colored and stained as the artist intends, appears through the mastery of the work of transfer, on the back, to obtain the desired and precise effect. We are left with the other side of melancholy and the deeper expression of a portrait of a young man.
Maria de Aires Silveira
TRAVEL DIARIES
The Diaries, both travel and illustrated, bring together scenarios from distant times by about 200 years. Miguel Ângelo Lupi was seconded to Luanda as a civil servant. He recorded, in a graphic diary, this personal experience, as if he were a reporter in a strange and unknown reality, in exotic landscapes, where he revealed the look of an anthropologist, sensitive and realistic.
Cristino da Silva and Tomás da Anunciação also experience the pleasure of traveling and discovering the regions of the country, by translating the feeling into the observation of the natural. Thus, the artists' astonishment at the distant horizons, the painfully twisted trees, and the isolation of the horse expressed the themes of the romantic generation, melancholy, drama, death, and the ephemeral.
Luís Silveirinha's title suggests a personal visual diary, but, imposes the illustration of an unreal figure, from a distant time or a distant country, in vigorous strokes, close to engraving, but impactful and mysterious, as if it belonged to an alternative space-time. It combines the strange and the evocation of the past, in a poetic tension, where present and absent coexist.
We see ourselves in the difference, through gestures and looks. The situations
are transversal to time, between contemporaneity and the nineteenth century.
Luís Silveirinha's bizarre creatures hover on a stained background, inspired by
Columbano who presents, in violent shadows, a drawing of Adamastor. It imposes
feelings of fear and courage in the face of the unknown, as iconic values "when
a figure/ shows itself to us in the air, robust and valid. / Of shapeless and very
great stature (...)" reveals Luís de Camões, in Canto V of the poem Os Lusíadas.
They are the others, the ones we face in frightening imaginaries, overshadowed
by giants proportional to our fears.
Maria de Aires Silveira
