João Batista da Costa (Itaguaí RJ 1865 - Rio de Janeiro RJ 1926)
João Batista da Costa was a painter, draftsman and teacher. He began his artistic training in 1877 at the Asilo de Meninos Desvalidos in Rio de Janeiro, where he studied drawing with Antônio de Souza Lobo (1840–1909). In 1885, he entered the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes (Aiba), where he was a student of Zeferino da Costa (1840–1915), José Maria de Medeiros (1849–1925) and Rodolfo Amoedo (1857–1941). In 1894, he received the foreign travel prize at the 1st Exposição Geral de Belas Artes. He traveled to Europe and, in 1897, studied with Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1912) and Tony Robert-Fleury (1837–1911) at the Académie Julian in Paris.
In 1906, he became a professor at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (Enba), replacing Rodolfo Amoedo in the chair of painting. His students included Candido Portinari (1903–1962), Orlando Teruz (1902–1984) and Quirino Campofiorito (1902–1993). From 1915 to 1926, he was director of Enba.
Critical Commentary
Baptista da Costa is recognized as one of the great Brazilian landscape painters of the turn of the 20th century. Born into great poverty, he is orphaned at the age of 8 and spends some time living with relatives. Unable to adapt, he runs away to Rio de Janeiro in 1873. He lives at the Asilo de Meninos Desvalidos, where he learns music, bookbinding and drawing. His teacher Antônio de Souza Lobo notices his aptitude and encourages him to pursue art studies, securing his admission to the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes - Aiba in 1885, with the support of Ambrósio Leitão da Cunha (1825 - 1898), the Baron of Mamoré. At Aiba, Baptista da Costa studies painting with Zeferino da Costa and later with Rodolfo Amoedo, whose classes he attends until graduating in 1889. During this period, as a student, he experiences the Academy's transition from a predominantly neoclassical orientation to a more realist one. This process parallels, to some extent, the change from the Second Reign to the Republic, and from Aiba to the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes - Enba. Paintings come to deal with less grandiloquent subjects, with gentler situations and harmonious, descriptive compositions.
In 1890, the painter shows his work for the first time at the Exposição Geral de Belas Artes. About four years later, he paints the canvas Em Repouso [At Rest] (ca. 1894). In this rural scene, the predominance of the setting over the figure reveals Baptista da Costa's greater interest in landscape. With this work the artist wins the foreign travel prize at the 1st Exposição Geral de Belas Artes in 1894, and he moves to France in 1896. There he attends the painting classes of Tony Robert-Fleury (1837 - 1911) and Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836 - 1912) at the Académie Julian. During his stay in Europe, the artist visits Germany and Italy. He returns to Brazil in 1898, deeply embittered after losing his first wife.
On his return, the artist begins exhibiting annually at the national Salons, receiving a second-class gold medal in 1900, a first-class one in 1904 and the grand gold medal in 1908. In 1906, he is invited by Aiba to replace Rodolfo Amoedo as head of the painting studio. At this point his work progressively eliminates figures and turns to describing the rural landscape. Baptista da Costa's output is vast and includes important genre scenes and portraits, such as those of João Gomes do Rego and Dom Pedro II, but it is in landscape painting that he achieves recognition.
His growing dedication to landscape goes hand in hand with his adoption of procedures of direct observation of the Brazilian scene. Baptista da Costa portrays the rural landscape without the romantic flights of Antônio Parreiras (1860 - 1937). He avoids the idealizations of earlier academic painters, seeking, in canvases such as Quaresmas [Glory Bushes], a contemplative relationship with Brazilian nature. Although there are similarities of procedure and poetics with French artists such as the members of the Barbizon School and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796 - 1875), Baptista da Costa can be said to be more restrained. He composes panoramas of varied nature, but avoids uneven relationships and strong contrasts. His landscapes are harmonious and serene; everything appears welcoming and at peace.
In 1915 the artist receives two honors. One is artistic: the medal of honor at the 22nd Exposição Geral de Belas Artes. The other is his election as director of Enba, a post he holds until the end of his life without ceasing to run the painting studio. In this role, Baptista da Costa trains many disciples in landscape painting, such as Levino Fanzeres (1884 - 1956), Francisco Manna (1879 - 1943) and Vicente Leite (1900 - 1941). Although he did not accept modernism, which he considered self-promoting and anarchic, Baptista da Costa was important in the training of painters close to avant-garde idioms, such as Candido Portinari and Manoel Santiago (1897 - 1987).
Critiques
"After Parreiras, the most famous landscape painter of the generation that succeeded him is Baptista da Costa.
Without the former's flights of fancy, without his audacity in color, he nevertheless proved himself, through the sensitivity and lightness of his touch, an excellent practitioner of the genre. He is the most delicate painter of the outskirts of Rio and the gardens of Petrópolis. Baptista da Costa is always successful in his effects and combinations of light and shade. Using a brief, calm, self-assured brushstroke, he manages to convey with sweetness and poetry the softness of the half-light beneath the leafy trees and the freshness of the greens of the soft grass that spreads along the banks of streams and clothes our tropical parks".
Ronald de Carvalho
RUBENS, Carlos. Vida e glória de Baptista da Costa. Prefácio Henrique Sálvio. Rio de Janeiro: Sociedade Brasileira de Belas Artes, 1947. p. 102.
"(...) He was undoubtedly, among Brazilian painters, the one who best captured the essence of the natural beauty of our landscape, the placidity of its rivers and the luxuriant tones of its vegetation. In his gentle landscapes one notes the influence of the Romantic school (whose greatest exponent in Europe was Corot), of the Barbizon School and, above all, of the romantic realism of the second half of the 19th century. Nature became the favorite model of realist painters; the grandiloquent manner of the academies was avoided, giving rise to a certain simplicity free of mawkishness. These characteristics, although their evolution had something negative about it, made it possible to express the spirit of the age suggestively (...) Through his work, Baptista da Costa can be considered an eminently lyrical landscape painter, one of the most Brazilian of our painters of the period. There may never have been, before or after him, another artist who so sincerely knew how to praise in his works the bucolic charms of the Brazilian landscape".
Nagib Francisco
FRANCISCO, Nagib. João Batista da Costa: 1865-1926. Prefácio Carlos Roberto Maciel Levy; apresentação Alcídio Mafra de Souza. Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 1984. p. 56-58.
"(...) Baptista da Costa was not a painter of striking technical expansiveness or emotional outbursts, because that did not suit his reserved, apparently humble temperament, which was nonetheless endowed with confidence in conscious making and with firm persistence (...) he serenely built his personal language and with it gave expression to the pictorial communication he sought, in which he spoke with particular eloquence. He refined his greater and definitive ability by seeking to record only the feeling that animated the landscape settings he preferred. His landscapes were especially praised by critics and sought after by collectors, setting a trend (...)".
Quirino Campofiorito
FRANCISCO, Nagib. João Batista da Costa: 1865-1926. Prefácio Carlos Roberto Maciel Levy; apresentação Alcídio Mafra de Souza. Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 1984. p. 51-52.
"His work commands the respect of those with the necessary cultivation in art, those endowed with aesthetic instinct and those of refined taste. It is true and wholesome; it does not adorn itself with pretensions nor seek to deceive through artifice. Like the nature of its author, it has the sincerity of simplicity, a strength of its own and the restraint of its means of expression, which stems from the shyness and modesty of the man who produced it (...) It will not make revolutions or stir up an era, but, compared with works that achieve the easy triumphs of fashion, it has the merit of those that cross generations and remain admired and well loved at any time".
Gonzaga Duque
FRANCISCO, Nagib. João Batista da Costa: 1865-1926. Prefácio Carlos Roberto Maciel Levy; apresentação Alcídio Mafra de Souza. Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 1984. p. 77.
"His long fidelity to landscape, on the contrary, gives João Baptista da Costa a unique place in the panorama of the end of the century. The vigor of his painting springs from the intensity of his adherence to visual data, from the sincerity of his approach to reality - as in Enchente [Flood], at the Museu da Pampulha in Belo Horizonte -, and from a command of his craft that allows him to build, with the varied ranges of his greens, the space and light of atmospheres at once true and filled with an idyllic sense of life and the countryside.
In Quaresma, this little Corot of Brazilian painting is the poet of farm life and the woods, of simple scenes that speak of the intimacy of family affection framed by the countryside. These are places the artist frequented, homes of a rising agrarian bourgeoisie and of hard-working professionals, where the rush of the city is forgotten and the roots of rural Brazil are rediscovered.
A traveler where there is nothing left to discover, Baptista da Costa made his art a counterpoint to the conventions of the rural anecdote, to official scenography, to boudoir Indianism and to painting worthy of illustrating psychiatric monographs, all triumphant at the time".
Luciano Migliaccio
MOSTRA DO REDESCOBRIMENTO, 2000, São Paulo. Arte do século XIX. Organização Nelson Aguilar, Suzanna Sassoun. Apresentação Edemar Cid Ferreira. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo: Associação Brasil 500 anos Artes Visuais, 2000. p. 185.
Testimonials
"I owe my artistic career to an act of independent rebellion: running away at dusk from my relatives' house in the countryside, when I had lost both father and mother; sleeping in the open forest; and, after various phases of my life, between the ages of eight and twelve, presenting myself in person to the director of the Asilo de Meninos Desvalidos to ask to be admitted to that house, where I was educated; enrolling at the Academia de Belas Artes by order of the Baron of Mamoré, then Minister of the Empire; but with courage and pride I brought to the performance of my post, to make up for any shortcomings there might be, my capacity for work, my good sense, which never abandoned me, my love for my profession and, above all, the fixed idea of doing something for the art of our Brazil".
Baptista da Costa
RUBENS, Carlos. Vida e glória de Baptista da Costa. Prefácio Henrique Sálvio. Rio de Janeiro: Sociedade Brasileira de Belas Artes, 1947. p. 133-134.
Solo Exhibitions
1892 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - First solo exhibition, at Enba
1894 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Clube do Hipódromo Nacional
1899 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Casa Postal
1910 - Belém PA - Solo, at Teatro da Paz
1925 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Galeria Jorge
Group Exhibitions
1890 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba - honorable mention
1894 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 1st General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba - foreign travel prize
1895 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 2nd General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1896 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 3rd General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1899 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1900 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 7th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba - second-class gold medal
1902 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 9th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1903 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 10th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1904 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 11th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba - first-class gold medal
1905 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 12th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1906 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 13th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1907 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 14th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1908 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 15th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba - large gold medal
1909 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 16th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1910 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 17th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1911 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 18th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1911 - São Paulo SP - First Brazilian Fine Arts Exhibition, at Liceu de Artes e Ofícios
1912 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 19th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1912 - São Paulo SP - Second Brazilian Fine Arts Exhibition, at Liceu de Artes e Ofícios
1913 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 20th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1914 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 21st General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1915 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 22nd General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba - medal of honor
1916 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 23rd General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1917 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 24th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1918 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 25th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1919 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 26th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1920 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 27th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1921 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 28th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1922 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 29th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1923 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 30th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1924 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 31st General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1925 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 32nd General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
Posthumous Exhibitions
1926 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Baptista da Costa: Retrospective, at Enba
1940 - São Paulo SP - Retrospective Exhibition: Works by the Great Masters of Painting and Their Disciples
1946 - São Paulo SP - 12th São Paulo Fine Arts Salon, at Galeria Prestes Maia
1948 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Retrospective of Painting in Brazil, at MNBA
1950 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - A Century of Brazilian Painting: 1850-1950, at MNBA
1953 - São Paulo SP - 2nd Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, at Pavilhão dos Estados
1956 - São Paulo SP - 50 Years of Brazilian Landscape, at MAM/SP
1965 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at MNBA
1970 - São Paulo SP - Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo 1970, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1974 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - The Sea, at Galeria Ibeu Copacabana
1977 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Aspects of the Brazilian Landscape: 1816-1916, at MNBA
1980 - São Paulo SP - The Brazilian Landscape: 1650-1976, at Paço das Artes
1984 - São Paulo SP - Tradition and Rupture: A Synthesis of Brazilian Art and Culture, at Fundação Bienal
1985 - São Paulo SP - 100 Itaú Works, at Masp
1986 - São Paulo SP - Dezenovevinte: A Turn of the Century, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1987 - São Paulo SP - Brazil Painted by National and Foreign Masters: 18th - 20th Centuries, at Masp
1988 - São Paulo SP - Brasiliana: Man and the Land, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1989 - Fortaleza CE - Brazilian Art of the 19th and 20th Centuries in Ceará Collections: Paintings and Drawings, at Espaço Cultural da Unifor
1989 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - The Rio de Janeiro of Machado de Assis, at CCBB
1989 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian Painting of the 19th Century: Works from the Banco Itaú Collection, at Itaugaleria
1990 - São Paulo SP - The Art Collection of the Municipality of São Paulo, at Masp
1991 - São Paulo SP - Desire in the Academy: 1847-1916, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Nature: Four Centuries of Art in Brazil, at CCBB
1993 - Santos SP - Six Great Painters, at Pinacoteca Benedito Calixto
1994 - São Paulo SP - A Critical Look at the 19th-Century Collection, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1995 - Campinas SP - From Seascape to Still Life, at Centro de Informática e Cultura II
1998 - São Paulo SP - São Paulo Iconography in Private Collections, at Museu da Casa Brasileira
2000 - Porto Alegre RS - From Frans Post to Eliseu Visconti: Museu Nacional de Belas Artes - RJ Collection, at Margs
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brasil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition, at Fundação Bienal
2001 - São Paulo SP - Aldo Franco Collection, at Pinacoteca do Estado
2001 - São Paulo SP - Trajectory of Light in Brazilian Art, at Itaú Cultural
2002 - Brasília DF - Barão do Rio Branco: His Work and His Time, at Ministério das Relações Exteriores. Palácio do Itamaraty
Source: Itaú Cultural
