Oscar Pereira da Silva (São Fidélis RJ 1867 - São Paulo SP 1939)
Painter, decorator, draftsman, teacher. Between 1882 and 1887 he studied at the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes - Aiba [Imperial Academy of Fine Arts], as a pupil of Zeferino da Costa, Victor Meirelles, Chaves Pinheiro and José Maria de Medeiros. In 1887 he became Zeferino da Costa's assistant in the decoration of the Igreja da Candelária in Rio de Janeiro. He won the last travel prize awarded by Emperor Dom Pedro II and moved to Paris in 1889. He studied with the painters Léon Bonnat and Jean-Léon Gérôme. During his stay in France he produced numerous studies and canvases. He returned to Brazil in 1896. In Rio de Janeiro he held a solo exhibition in the hall of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes - Enba [National School of Fine Arts], showing 33 works made in Europe. That same year he moved to São Paulo. He taught at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios de São Paulo - Laosp and at the Ginásio do Estado, and also gave private lessons in his studio. In 1897 he founded the Núcleo Artístico, which later became the Escola de Belas Artes, where he taught. Between 1903 and 1911 he worked on the decoration of the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo, creating three murals: O Teatro na Grécia Antiga [Theater in Ancient Greece], A Dança [Dance] and A Música [Music]. Between 1907 and 1917 he made paintings for the Igreja de Santa Cecília. As a grantee of the São Paulo State Government, he traveled to Paris in 1925.
Critical Commentary
A painter of history paintings, portraits, religious subjects, genre scenes, still lifes and landscapes, Oscar Pereira da Silva was also a great copyist. His main works are in the city of São Paulo, notably Escrava Romana [Roman Slave Woman], ca. 1882, Infância de Giotto [Giotto's Childhood], 1895, and Fundação da Cidade de São Paulo [Founding of the City of São Paulo], 1909, in the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo - Pesp; Desembarque de Cabral em Porto Seguro [Cabral's Landing at Porto Seguro], 1922, and O Príncipe Regente D. Pedro, Jorge Avilez ao lado da Fragata União [The Prince Regent Dom Pedro and Jorge Avilez beside the Frigate União], at the Museu Paulista da Universidade de São Paulo - MP/USP. His experience at the Igreja da Candelária in Rio de Janeiro, as Zeferino da Costa's assistant, bore fruit in São Paulo, where he carried out the decoration of the Igreja de Santa Cecília. The evangelists are depicted in the dome; the Immaculate Conception and the Betrothal of Saint Joseph in the chapels. Completing the ensemble, a frieze of portraits of clergymen runs around the nave. In the early 20th century, several colonial chapels in São Paulo were replaced by Neo-Gothic or Neo-Colonial buildings, opening up work for decorative artists such as Oscar Pereira da Silva and Benedito Calixto. Besides the Igreja de Santa Cecília, both worked in the churches of Santa Ifigênia, Consolação and Rosário. Pereira da Silva also produced decorative work for the Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Conceição.
In Paris he perfected his art in the studios of conservative painters, taking no interest in Realism and still less in Impressionism. Largely because of the academic training he received, he was not influenced by modern painting, preferring to continue along a traditional line, which he worked with great technical quality.
He cultivated biblical and historical subjects, themes that no longer interested most painters of his time. Examples of this tendency are Salomé, 1913, Lídia and Escrava Romana, canvases of female figures that reveal an attachment to academic traditions and seem anachronistic for their time. His works show meticulous and flawless drawing, like that of his teacher Zeferino da Costa. Some works, especially the genre scenes, such as Criação da Vovó [Grandma's Pet], 1890, Consertador de Porcelanas [The Porcelain Mender], 1894, Cozinha na Roça [Country Kitchen] and Canto Íntimo [Intimate Corner], seem less strictly governed by traditional aesthetics, showing some boldness more in subject matter than in pictorial treatment.
His laborious compositions are characteristic of the expansion of painting that prevailed in the Brazilian art world in the early Republic, which explains both his high productivity and acceptance at the time and the criticism he later received. Pereira da Silva fitted successfully into a context in which art teaching and official commissions were the main sources of work for artists. He therefore worked as a teacher and was much sought after to produce works for government-related institutions.
He also painted some landscapes, but the main task he took on was to recreate, in large compositions, episodes of national or São Paulo history. The best example is certainly Desembarque de Cabral em Porto Seguro [Cabral's Landing at Porto Seguro]. The canvas became so well known, serving as illustration for school textbooks and other publications, that it remains to this day the most popular depiction of Pedro Álvares Cabral's arrival in Brazil. It is worth noting that the work was made for the celebrations of the centenary of Brazil's Independence in 1922, the same year the Modern Art Week stirred São Paulo's cultural scene. Another important history painting is Sessão das Cortes de Lisboa em 9 de maio de 1822 [Session of the Lisbon Cortes on May 9, 1822], an episode in which several Brazilian deputies, led by Antonio Carlos de Andrade e Silva, argued before the Portuguese Cortes that a single sovereign should rule the kingdoms of Portugal and Brazil. Like O Desembarque, the canvas was commissioned by the historian and director of the Museu Paulista, Afonso d'Escragnolle Taunay, to fill the spaces of the newly created museum. The choice of particular historical moments was part of the project of building and shaping national identity and memory.
Oscar Pereira da Silva can be criticized for his repetition of formulas and his imperviousness to the new pictorial trends in vogue internationally. Late in life he produced a larger number of seascapes, landscapes, still lifes and watercolors. The author of a large but uneven body of work, almost always based on traditional aesthetics, and regarded by some critics as a weak and overpraised painter,1 he based his work, as the critic Quirino Campofiorito states, "on the conviction that it was inadmissible for an artist to distort in order thereby to express better".2
Notes
1 BARATA, Mário. Pintura e escultura: posições do academismo e tentativas do simbolismo. In: ZANINI, Walter (org.). História geral da arte no Brasil. São Paulo: Instituto Walther Moreira Salles, Fundação Djalma Guimarães, 1983. p. 443.
2 CAMPOFIORITO, Quirino. A Proteção do Imperador e os pintores do Segundo Reinado: 1850 - 1890. Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 1983. (História da pintura brasileira no século XIX, 4). p. 50.
Critiques
"Like the artists subject to the discipline of teaching at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, he refused to admit any interest in the renewing artistic movements, from the audacious realism of Courbet, through the technical and inspirational liberation of Delacroix's Romanticism, let alone Impressionism, already victorious beyond the borders of official art. And so our painter was to base his work, as he did throughout his long life, on the conviction that it was inadmissible for an artist to distort in order thereby to express better. It was the postulate, respected even by the critics hostile to the renewing movements, that an artist may only conceive beautiful forms and noble subjects, and that it is his duty to draw accurately and to embellish even the cruelest realism life may present. (...) With such artistic convictions he carried on (...) when the movement unleashed by the 1922 Modern Art Week had already changed the face of our most representative art, which was confirmed by the support given to it by the generation that rose to prominence in the 1930s. (...) Without having shown vigorous impulses that would reveal emotional power, Oscar Pereira da Silva managed to maintain, over a good fifty-seven years of permanent and intense production since his return to the country in 1896, all the care of rigorously elaborated drawing, without ever turning for a moment to the new face painting was acquiring over this span of time".
Quirino Campofiorito
CAMPOFIORITO, Quirino. História da pintura brasileira no século XIX. Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 1983.
Collections
Acervo da Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (SP)
Igreja da Consolação - São Paulo SP
Museu Mariano Procópio - Juiz de Fora MG
Museu Nacional de Belas Artes - MNBA - Rio de Janeiro RJ
Museu Paulista da Universidade de São Paulo - MP/USP - São Paulo SP
Solo Exhibitions
1896 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Enba
1898 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Banco União de São Paulo
1898 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Banco Construtor
Group Exhibitions
1884 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 26th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1890 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1894 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 1st General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1896 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 3rd General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1897 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 4th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1898 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 5th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1902 - São Paulo SP - Exhibition of Industrial Fine Arts
1904 - Saint Louis (United States) - Saint Louis Exposition
1904 - São Paulo SP - Saint Louis Exposition
1907 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 14th General Exhibition of Fine Arts
1907 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 14th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1908 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Exhibition Commemorating the Opening of the Ports
1912 - São Paulo SP - 2nd Brazilian Fine Arts Exhibition, at Liceu de Artes e Ofícios
1914 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 21st General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1922 - São Paulo SP - 1st General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Palácio das Indústrias
1928 - São Paulo SP - Grupo Almeida Júnior, at Palácio das Arcadas
1934 - São Paulo SP - 1st São Paulo Fine Arts Salon, at Rua 11 de Agosto
1935 - São Paulo SP - 2nd São Paulo Fine Arts Salon
1935 - São Paulo SP - 3rd São Paulo Fine Arts Salon
1936 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Palácio das Arcadas
1937 - São Paulo SP - 5th São Paulo Fine Arts Salon
1939 - São Paulo SP - 6th São Paulo Fine Arts Salon
Posthumous Exhibitions
1940 - São Paulo SP - Retrospective Exhibition: Works by the Great Masters of Painting and Their Disciples
1944 - São Paulo SP - 10th São Paulo Fine Arts Salon, at Galeria Prestes Maia
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
1954 - São Paulo SP - São Paulo Fine Arts Salon, at Galeria Prestes Maia
1970 - São Paulo SP - Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo 1970, at MAB/Faap
1976 - São Paulo SP - The Portrait in the Pinacoteca Collection, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1980 - São Paulo SP - The Brazilian Landscape: 1650-1976, at Paço das Artes
1981 - São Paulo SP - Four Great Painters in São Paulo, at Fundação Bienal
1982 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 150 Years of Marine Painting in the History of Brazilian Art, at MNBA
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
1991 - São Paulo SP - Desire in the Academy: 1847-1916, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1991 - São Paulo SP - Oscar Pereira da Silva: Watercolors, at Renato Magalhães Gouvêa Escritório de Arte
1994 - São Paulo SP - A Critical Look at the 19th-Century Collection, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1998 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Seascapes in Major São Paulo Collections, at Espaço Cultural da Marinha/Museu Naval
1998 - São Paulo SP - São Paulo Iconography in Private Collections, at Museu da Casa Brasileira
2000 - Caxias do Sul RS - Traveling Exhibition of the Margs Collection
2000 - Passo Fundo RS - Traveling Exhibition of the Margs Collection
2000 - Pelotas RS - Traveling Exhibition of the Margs Collection
2000 - Porto Alegre RS - From Frans Post to Eliseu Visconti: Museu Nacional de Belas Artes - RJ Collection, at Margs
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brasil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition. Letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha, at Museu Histórico Nacional
2000 - Santa Maria RS - Traveling Exhibition of the Margs Collection
2000 - São Paulo SP - The Human Figure in the Itaú Collection, at Itaú Cultural
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brasil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition, at Fundação Bienal
2001 - São Paulo SP - Aldo Franco Collection, at Pinacoteca do Estado
2002 - Brasília DF - Baron of Rio Branco: His Work and His Time, at Ministério das Relações Exteriores. Palácio do Itamaraty
2003 - São Paulo SP - Painters of the São Paulo Coast, at Sociarte
2004 - São Paulo SP - The Price of Seduction: From Corset to Silicone, at Itaú Cultural
Source: Itaú Cultural
