José Roberto Teixeira Leite

The very rich and multi-faced Brazilian art of the XIX century continues as a large and unknown territory widely opened to our art historians which, unfortunately, with very rare exceptions, insist in framing it, due to selfishness or ignorance in the common ditch of what they define quickly and pejoratively as academicism: just to have an idea of how antiquated are our studious as related to art, we can just say that out of the two best books that have already been consecrated, one is the more than a century old, The Brazilian Art by Gonzaga Dutra, which contains clear analysis of a critic that was closely acquainted with major part of the studied artists, and the other, up to the present time, not superseded by the quantity of information, reproductions of works of art, portrait of artists and fac-similes of signatures that close the book A Century of Paintings 1816-1916, by Laudelino Freire, published 91 years ago; in the same manner, just to state two more examples, the most complete study about Eliseu Visconti still is the one of Frederico Barata, launched more than 60 years ago, and on Pedro Weigärtner nothing was edited after the monography that Ângelo Guido has dedicated to him in 1956; even more constraining is to certify that up to the present time never has a single monography been published on Zeferino da Costa, Rodolfo Amoedo, Lucílio and Georgina de Albuquerque, Benedito Calixto, Almeida Reis, Rodolfo and Henrique Bernardelli, Alvim Correa, Eugênio Latour, Estêvão Silva, Décio Vilares, Teles Júnior, José Maria de Medeiros, Manoel Lopes Rodrigues, Pinto Bandeira, Rodolfo and Carlos Chambelland, Artur and João Timóteo and many others of the most important national artists before the Modernism, and which makes us to ask where are and what are our art researchers and critics doing, for sure busy with themes more transcendental!

PEDRO AMÉRICO DE FIGUEIREDO E MELLO

As it can be seen, the art very little studied and known in the actuality of its own country, it is not to admire that the public has no slightest idea of what our art represent, nor do the directors and protectors of museums, foreign historians and critics, first because our cultural authorities have never thought of taking to Europe or to the United States an exhibition capable to reveal what has the Brazilian XIX Century represented artistically – an initiative that, if put into practice, would without doubt contribute to place it in a highlighted place in the map of the Occidental History of Art – and secondly because there is no slightest reference to any of our main artists of that periods in works of art so comprehensive as the La Sculpture au XIX Siècle, by Maurice Rheims, 1820-1920 Les Petits Maîtres de la Peinture Valeur de Demain, de Gérald Schurr, the MacGraw-Hill Dictionary of Art, the Thames and Hudson Encyclopedia of the Arts, the Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Painting, the Dictionnaire Encyclopédique de la Peinture or the Bulfinch Guide to Art History, which without embargo dedicate a large space to thousands of different artists just not to mention of strange nationalities. Of course, someone may remember, as exceptions to the rule the Dictionnaire by E. Bénézit, if it was not so full of significant errors and omissions, and more recently publications such as the Grove Dictionary of Art and the Oxford Companion to Western Art, which, among more than 20 thousand artist biographies, include those of some Brazilians.

GIOVANNI BATISTA CASTAGNETO

Through the melancholic panorama given above (to which should be added the non existence outside of cities such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and a few others, of public heritages in which it is possible to admire significant examples of the best Brazilian eight hundred art), it is possible to appraise the difficulties with which the collector that intended to follow in this field, would face and fated to trust his own instinct and to guide himself by the little amount of information to which he was access, whether through a query to the poor bibliography available or in visits to sporadic exhibitions – such as those recently dedicated to Almeida Júnior and Oscar Pereira da Silva in the State Art Gallery.

Due to all this, or saying more: in spite of all this, it is remarkable to see the existence of considerable number of important collectors which taste is oriented in the direction of painting and, in e minor degree, to the Brazilian sculpture of the XIX Century, one of which generously divide with the visitors of the present edition of the already traditional Salão de Arte, its opulent collection, integrated by selected group of rarities and practically covering all the segment in which the period is sub-divided, as not only one XIX Century existed but several. Thus, the art of the Colonial Brazil is present with the most important member of the Escola Baiana de Pintura, José Joaquim da Rocha (died in 1807), while Nicolas-Antoine Taunay and Jean-Baptiste Debret represent the Missão Artística Francesa of 1816, which institutes in Brazil the official artistic discipline in addition of introducing in the country the new esthetic, neo-classic or already pre-romantic idea. Followed is the disciple per excellence of Debret, Manuel de Araújo Porto-alegre, one of the introducers of the Romantism in the local arts and literature, and Johann Moritz Rugendas, the most important of the so called traveling artists – a chapter in which Brazil is equal, when not superseding, the attraction that the European painters felt for the so far away regions of the Middle East, of the Far East, or of the Northern Africa, destination and scenario of their picturesque trips, due to the quantity of professionals or simple curious individuals, have passed by since the beginning of the century fixing in oil painting or aquarelles our landscaping and habits.

JEAN BAPTISTE DEBRET

Arnaud Julien Pallière, Henri Nicolas Vinet – probable disciple of Corot, and one of the first to paint em plein air a Brazilian landscape – the meticulous Nicolau Antonio Facchinetti and Friedrich Hagedorn form the nucleus of those that worked aside of the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes, as they have undertaken their artistic education far, in Europe. More numerous and known as it covers some of the most important artists of what can be called the Brazilian School, is the group formed by those that deserved the protection of Pedro II or – in the case of the excellent Agostinho José da Mota – of the Empress Teresa Cristina: the collection offers the visitors originals of the highest quality of Vitor Meireles, Pedro Américo, Almeida Júnior, Amoedo, the two Bernardelli, Belmiro de Almeida, Parreiras, Oscar Pereira da Silva and Gustavo Dall´Ara.

The revolution that the presence and actuation among us of the German Georg Grimm have defined in the end of century Brazilian art can be appraised when comparing for example a landscape by Facchinetti to the numerous landscapes and marine scenes here exhibited painted by Grimm himself, of his assistant Thomas Driendl and of Castagneto, Caron, Vasquez and inclusive França Júnior, this later the doublé of playwright and painter. Closing the collection – and here we are between the XIX/XX centuries - characteristic paintings of Batista da Costa and Eliseu Visconti, and a sculpture of Eduardo de Sá.