The Discovery of Nature, Light and Air

Praia de banhos, Marques de Oliveira
In 1879 Marques de Oliveira and Silva Porto introduced a modern way of capturing light in landscapes, following their apprenticeship in Paris as students and avid observers of the open-air techniques of the Barbizon School. Praia de banhos references painters in the vanguard of international art, such as Manet or Boudin, and, with Charneca de Belas, reveals new naturalist leanings, focused on bright, open spaces.
The recently emerged Romantic Movement was already emphasising the importance of painting that drew inspiration directly from nature, imbued with natural light, in landscapes depicting all the drama and sentimentality that could be gleaned from them (Cristino da Silva and Alfredo de Andrade) but at the same time introducing and conditioning naturalist formulas, with rural tendencies.
At the turn of the century the sculptures of Soares dos Reis can be highlighted as syntheses of romantic values as well as innovative naturalistic ideas. In the early twentieth century António Carneiro and Henrique Pousão marked the gap between picturesque landscape painting and the autonomy of pictorial art by creating monochrome images and compositions structured with planes of colour, reflecting daringly modern tendencies.
M.A.S.

LANDSCAPES AND EVERYDAY LIFE – THE CITY AND THE MOUNTAINS
Volta do mercado, Silva Porto
The ‘quiet revolution’ of the mid-nineteenth century, sparked by the landscape painting of Tomás da Anunciação, responded to the call of Almeida Garrett, in Viagens na minha Terra (Travels in my Homeland), to discover one’s own country and its people. Cinco artistas em Sintra, by Cristino da Silva, encapsulates this idea, presenting the fundamental concerns of the Portuguese Romantics. Somewhere between portraiture, landscape, a depiction of everyday life and a demonstration of the importance of the landscape setting. prominent figures from an urban milieu are depicted with a ‘Romantic eye’, framed by branches and leaves.
Silva Porto imposed his modern ideas on a picturesque world, discovering narrative continuities in verist processes that involved ‘penetrating the real’, as had already been attempted by the romantics and Alfredo Keil in vaguely realist work. These are images of a charming, sunlit rusticity, evoking the simple life of rural workers, along with the depiction of the mores of the urban bourgeoisie in elegant gatherings on the beachfront. This juxtaposition expresses the city–countryside dichotomy, as described in the novel Cidade e as Serras (The City and the Mountains) by Eça de Queirós, written in 1892 and published in 1901.
M.A.S.

ASSERTING THE COMMON MAN
Clara, José Malhoa
In 1872 Ramalho Ortigão, like Garrett, pointed out the need for a painter to depict people’s everyday lives and interpret human reality, alluding to the importance of portraying picturesque scenes in a realistic way. The artist who acted upon these demands was José Malhoa, from the end of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Malhoa became acclaimed as – in the words of Fialho de Almeida – the creator of an odisseia rústica nacional (‘national rustic odyssey’) with his portraits of different types of figures, seen as quintessentially Portuguese.
Following criticism of the way in which the new ‘naturalists’ approached landscape painting, and the subsequent success and acceptance of the depiction of people’s lives, as was also being suggested in literary themes, the common man, who had initially been a peripheral element in landscape painting, began to be the focus of the composition. Malhoa’s portrait of a water carrier adapts to the sentimentality and drama of the Romantics, to the realism of Miguel Ângelo Lupi and to a certain visibility and assertion of the human figure, as the artist broadens and furthers his vision by giving it a distinct narrative character and directly portraying an idealised rural existence.
M.A.S.

THE PORTRAIT
Retrato de D. Helena de Dulac, António Ramalho
By depicting the Lisbon bourgeoisie in the Fontismo period (1868-1889), this portrait expresses the assertion of the individual and humanises the sitter in a way which reflects the ideals proposed by the romantics, and their concern with subjectivity and the need to refer to social and artistic status. The fin-de-siècle realism, intricate detail and faithful portraiture achieved by Miguel-Ângelo Lupi is the forerunner of the naturalistic approach, committed to expressiveness, which can be seen in the exuberant chromaticism of António Ramalho or in Columbano’s striking portraits, based on psychological observation and built around the importance of the power of the image and the emergence of an intellectual elite.
A gallery of internalised compositions in narcissistic poses, from the melancholy of the romantics to a posed, proud representation of an artistic attitude, includes the self-portraits of the main artists involved in the processes of change, while the sets of portraits reveal the major changes in Portuguese society through the choice of the people portrayed.
M.A.S.

INTIMISM
Concerto de amadores, Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro
The newly awakened interest in everyday life, associated with ideas about civility and a desire to assert the bourgeoisie, not only through portraits but also through depicting their milieu, shows the importance that was placed upon capturing everyday moments at the end of the 19th century. Alfredo Keil’s Leitura de uma carta, which was painted in the artist’s studio on the basis of a photograph (a valuable tool for the realistic observation of habits and attitudes), depicts a scene of intimate companionship and family life.
Domestic interiors, ambiguously intimate scenes and portraits focus on the quotidian and magnify it out of all proportion in Columbano’s Concerto de amadores, which depicts a musical gathering among friends in the impressive, sensitive, painting style using planes of colour that was widely developed by this artist. Such paintings feature still lifes and interiors of undetermined non-places, of an intuited reality, combining structural realism with a subjectivity geared towards a sensitive and imaginative vision of what is real.
M.A.S.

SYMBOLISMS
Amor e psyché, Veloso Salgado
Symbolism first appeared in Portuguese art with the pioneering oeuvre of Porto-born Joaquim Vitorino Ribeiro (1849–1928), who left behind an unedited text of Pre-Raphaelite literary theory. At a time when naturalism was becoming a prominent movement it was further developed in narrative terms by José de Brito, and matured in literary terms by Veloso Salgado.
This literary narrative of interlinked symbols was modernised by Sousa Lopes, and culminated in remarkably decorative leanings. This can be seen in the work of Luciano Freire, one of the extremely rare examples of Portuguese Art Nouveau.
R.A.S.