Victor Meirelles (Florianópolis SC 1832 - Rio de Janeiro RJ 1903)
Painter, draftsman, teacher.
Victor Meirelles de Lima began his artistic studies around 1838 with the Argentine engineer Marciano Moreno. In 1847 he moved to Rio de Janeiro and enrolled at the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes - Aiba [Imperial Academy of Fine Arts], where in 1849 he began the course in history painting. In 1852 he won the travel prize and the following year left for Italy. In Rome, in 1854, he attended the classes of Tommaso Minardi (1787 - 1871) and later those of Nicola Consoni (1814 - 1884), with whom he made a series of studies from the live model. With the extension of the stipend he had been granted, he continued his training in Paris, where in 1857 he enrolled at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, attending the classes of Léon Cogniet (1794 - 1880) and then receiving guidance from Cogniet's pupil Andrea Gastaldi (1826 - 1889). During his time abroad he corresponded with Porto Alegre (1806 - 1879). He returned to Brazil in 1861 and a year later was appointed professor of history painting at Aiba. Between 1869 and 1872 he executed two large canvases, Passagem do Humaitá [The Passage of Humaitá] and Batalha de Riachuelo [Battle of Riachuelo]. In 1879 he took part in the Exposição Geral de Belas Artes [General Exhibition of Fine Arts], showing Batalha dos Guararapes [Battle of Guararapes] alongside Pedro Américo's (1843 - 1905) Batalha do Avaí [Battle of Avaí]. The presentation of the two works sparked great controversy and intense debate in the art world. From 1886 on he devoted himself to painting panoramas, notably the Panorama Circular da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro [Circular Panorama of the City of Rio de Janeiro], made in Belgium together with Henri Langerock (1830 - 1915), and Entrada da Esquadra Legal no Porto do Rio de Janeiro em 1894 [Entry of the Loyalist Fleet into the Port of Rio de Janeiro in 1894], produced that same year.
Critical Commentary
Born in Nossa Senhora do Desterro, present-day Florianópolis, he went to Rio de Janeiro in 1847, where he studied at the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes - Aiba. In 1852 he won Aiba's travel prize. In Rome he was taught by the artists Tommaso Minardi (1787 - 1871) and Nicola Consoni (1814 - 1884) and came into contact with "purist" painting, in which drawing is subtler and more delicate than in the neoclassical tradition and colors are softened. He studied the works of the Italian masters, especially artists of the Venetian School such as Titian (ca. 1488 - 1576) and Paolo Veronese (1528 - 1588), in whom he showed particular interest. He obtained a renewal of his stipend and, from 1857, studied in Paris with the artist Léon Cogniet (1794 - 1880) and later with Andrea Gastaldi (1826 - 1889). While living abroad he kept up an intense correspondence with Porto Alegre (1806 - 1879), painter and writer, director of Aiba between 1854 and 1857. After more than eight years away, he returned to Brazil in 1861. The following year he was appointed professor of history and landscape painting at Aiba, a post he held until 1890.
While in Paris he painted A Primeira Missa no Brasil [The First Mass in Brazil] (1861). The critic Gonzaga Duque (1863 - 1911) commented on this work, stressing its historical importance: "... The first mass could be nothing other than what is there. It had, necessarily, to be that ensemble, that is, an altar, a priest officiating, another serving as acolyte, the garrison of the Portuguese fleet attending the divine office, the natives approaching, cautious, amazed, imitating what they saw being done. That is what history tells, and nothing more".1 The painting depicts the first mass as it is described in the letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha (ca. 1451 - 1500). The document, published only in 1817, took on a central role in the history of Brazil. When the painting was made, the Indianist theme was present in Romantic literature and in the visual arts. Noteworthy are the poetic sense of organization of the groups taking part in the scene and the chromatic range, with very subtle tonal transitions. The main scene stretches into the distance, and the viewer's gaze is directed toward the cross, at the top. In the background a serene landscape opens up, bathed in soft light, with tropical vegetation. The painting has a contemplative atmosphere. Meirelles created an image of history that can hardly be forgotten and which, for many sectors of the 19th-century intelligentsia, is the first great Brazilian work of art.
The canvas Moema (1866) is inspired by Canto VI of the epic poem Caramuru (1781), by Friar José de Santa Rita Durão (1722 - 1784), which, like other literary texts of the period, deals with the Indianist theme linked to the national imagination. The poem tells of the misfortune of the indigenous woman who, abandoned by the Portuguese Caramuru, throws herself into the sea and follows the ship on which he is departing. In the painting, the naked body, washed by the waves on the beach, is displayed in the foreground; the face reveals an exotic beauty. The painter creates an image that is sensual and at the same time unsettling. He reveals a poetic feeling in the depiction of the landscape.
Throughout his career he received several commissions for official paintings, among them Batalha de Riachuelo [Battle of Riachuelo] (ca. 1882), in which, with a naturalistic technique of representation, he explores the triumph and destruction associated with combat. At the Exposição Geral de Belas Artes of 1879, the canvases A Batalha de Guararapes [The Battle of Guararapes], by Victor Meirelles, and Batalha do Avaí [Battle of Avaí], by Pedro Américo (1843 - 1905), were shown, and they marked an era in Brazilian painting. A controversy arose in the press around the two canvases, considered antagonistic.
With the Proclamation of the Republic, the administration of Aiba changed and it was renamed Escola Nacional de Belas Artes - Enba [National School of Fine Arts]. Proposals for renewing art teaching emerged, and former professors such as Victor Meirelles were dismissed. He became marginalized, being identified as the official painter of the monarchy. From 1885, seeking an alternative to history painting and official commissions, he set up a company of panoramas of the city of Rio de Janeiro. At the end of his life he lived off the public showings of his panoramas and, melancholic, lamented that the public had forgotten his paintings. Of the first panorama, exhibited in Brussels and Paris in 1889, only six studies have survived. In them, the landscape is rendered with a balanced distribution of tones, and the viewer's eye is invited to travel through the variety of transitions, from the half-darkness of the vegetation to the luminosity of the atmosphere.
Victor Meirelles played an important role in the training of many artists in the second half of the 19th century, owing to his long career as a teacher. He stands out above all for the qualities of his painting: superb drawing and refined tonal combinations in canvases worked with feeling and poetry.
Notes
1 DUQUE, Gonzaga. A Arte brasileira. Campinas: Mercado de Letras, 1995. p. 173. (Arte: ensaios e documentos).
Critiques
"Victor Meirelles was hailed by the more conservative critics - Araújo Viana, for example, proclaims him a 'towering and immortal individuality in national painting' - and rejected by the followers of modern art. In fact, he did not assimilate the new trends of the 19th century: he advanced beyond the academicism of the French Mission by seeking inspiration in the land and its people and by taking the natives as his motif, whether in Primeira Missa no Brasil [First Mass in Brazil], in Moema or in other canvases - the presence of Indianism, which had been one of the features of literary Romanticism in Brazil. Meticulous in observation, he departs from conventional rules to build his own norms. He did not remain a prisoner of the Academy, for feeling and poetry hover over his canvases, above conventions. More emotional than cerebral, he was the counterpart to Pedro Américo".
Celso Kelly
ARTE no Brasil. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1979. p. 553.
"There seems to be no doubt that Victor Meirelles then used art as an aid to education, seeking to call and attract schoolchildren to his exhibition so that they might acquire new knowledge there. (...) we consider 'Victor Meirelles the forerunner of the use of art as an educational factor among us', that is, the one who, among our compatriots, first had the idea of using art as a means of dissemination and as a complement to education".
Elza Ramos Peixoto
ROSA, Angelo de Proença; MELLO JÚNIOR, Donato; PEIXOTO, Elza Ramos; SOUZA, Sara Regina Silveira de. Victor Meirelles de Lima: 1832-1903. Rio de Janeiro, Pinakotheke, 1982.
"The euphoria of the imperial government in the late 1860s and during the following decade, the 1870s, had allowed him (Victor Meirelles) commissions for canvases commemorating the great events of the War of the Triple Alliance, in a comparison - with all due proportions, on a modest scale - with those of the Napoleonic era... Brazil already had two artists for these official consecrations: Victor Meirelles and Pedro Américo. And it had a minister interested in them: Councilor João Alfredo Correia de Oliveira".
Donato Mello Júnior
ROSA, Ângelo Proença; MELLO JÚNIOR, Donato; PEIXOTO, Elza Ramos. Victor Meirelles de Lima: 1832-1903. Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 1982. p. 109-110.
"Meirelles had studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, which had been shaped by French teachers who arrived in 1816, of good neoclassical stock. But the years he had spent in Rome, working above all with a pupil of Minardi, Nicola Consoni, brought him into contact with so-called 'purist' painting - an art in which drawing is frailer, subtler and more delicate than in the tradition inaugurated by David, an art that tempers neoclassical anatomical vigor in favor of simplified bodies, an art whose colors are softened and in which an internal geometry governs the composition -, a geometry of tranquil balance. (...) In the Rome of Pius IX, his neoclassical training had been softened and spiritualized, acquiring a definitive way of being that his Parisian period would not be able to erase. All these principles appear clearly in the Primeira Missa [First Mass], whose aim was to establish a harmonious and spiritual moment in which opposing worlds were reconciled".
Jorge Coli
COLI, Jorge. Primeira missa e invenção da descoberta. In: NOVAES, Adauto (Org.) A descoberta do homem e do mundo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998. p. 107-121.
"For the first time since Debret's day, the State again commissioned large canvases from artists, seeking to create a body of images of the events of the war to be handed down to later generations. The role of history painting in education and in the creation of national consciousness had finally become part of the institutions' heritage.
Victor Meirelles and Pedro Américo were the protagonists of this change. In 1866 Meirelles received from the Minister of the Navy, Affonso Celso, the task of painting a large picture commemorating the naval Battle of Riachuelo, fought in June 1865 against the Paraguayan forces - a battle considered decisive by the Navy, which had managed to avoid the enemy's surprise attack and had established control over the river network that would be decisive for victory. (...)
With the fall of the monarchy and the Proclamation of the Republic in 1889, expectations of cultural renewal arose. (...)
Victor Meirelles was the only artist to be marginalized by the regime, which identified him as the official painter of the monarchy. He was, however, surrounded by the admiration he had earned from his students, which made him a point of reference for the more sensitive artists of the younger generation.
Following the example of Gerveaux in Paris, in 1885 Meirelles had created a Company of Panoramas of the City of Rio de Janeiro, recruiting contributing partners and improvising himself as manager. Panorama painting, showing not only the beauty but also the level of urban and industrial development of the capital, was to serve as propaganda for Brazil among future European emigrants, who were expected to meet the demand for free labor created by the already imminent abolition of slavery.
The first panorama of Rio de Janeiro, of which only six studies remain at the MNBA, was executed by the artist in Brussels and shown in the Belgian capital and in Paris on the occasion of the 1889 Exposition Universelle.
Meirelles, too, was therefore seeking an alternative to history painting and official commissions, which the Republic would soon deny him".
Luciano Migliaccio
MOSTRA DO REDESCOBRIMENTO, 2000, SÃO PAULO. Arte do século XIX. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo: Associação Brasil 500 anos Artes Visuais, 2000. p. 109-110, 150.
Group Exhibitions
1846 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 7th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1852 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 12th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1859 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 13th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1860 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 14th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1861 - Paris (France) - Salon de Paris
1862 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 15th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1864 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 16th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1865 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 17th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1866 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 18th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1867 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 19th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1868 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 20th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1870 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 21st General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1872 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 22nd General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1875 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 23rd General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1876 - Philadelphia (United States) - Centennial Exhibition of American Independence - painting award
1878 - Turin (Italy) - Turin Exhibition - gold medal
1879 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 25th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1883 - Paris (France) - Salon de Paris
1884 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 26th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1889 - Paris (France) - Exposition Universelle - gold medal
Posthumous Exhibitions
1940 - São Paulo SP - Retrospective Exhibition: Works by the Great Masters of Painting and Their Disciples
1941 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Pedro Américo and Victor Meirelles, 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
1961 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Rio in Brazilian Painting, at Biblioteca Estadual da Guanabara
1969 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Retrospective, at MNBA
1977 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Aspects of the Brazilian Landscape: 1816-1916, at MNBA
1977 - São Paulo SP - MASP Masterpiece, at Sesc Pompeia
1982 - Florianópolis SC - Exhibition Commemorating the Sesquicentennial of the Birth of Victor Meirelles, at Museu de Arte de Santa Catarina
1984 - São Paulo SP - Tradition and Rupture: A Synthesis of Brazilian Art and Culture, at Fundação Bienal
1985 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Preparatory Studies of the 19th Century, at MNBA
1986 - Belo Horizonte MG - IBM Brazil Moment, at Espaço Cultural IBM
1986 - Brasília DF - IBM Brazil Moment, at Espaço Cultural IBM
1986 - Florianópolis SC - Victor Meirelles: Genesis of a Genius, at Museu de Arte de Santa Catarina
1987 - São Paulo SP - The Weave of Taste: Another Look at Everyday Life, at Fundação Bienal
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
1991 - São Paulo SP - Desire in the Academy: 1847-1916, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1993 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Expansion, Order and Defense, at Museu Histórico Nacional
1994 - São Paulo SP - Bienal Brasil Século XX, at Fundação Bienal
1994 - São Paulo SP - A Critical Look at the 19th-Century Collection, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazil Rediscovered, at Paço Imperial
2000 - Porto Alegre RS - From Frans Post to Eliseu Visconti: Museu Nacional de Belas Artes Collection, at Margs
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Views of Rio in the Geyer Collection, at CCBB
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brazil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition. 19th-Century Art, at Fundação Bienal
2001 - São Paulo SP - 30 Masters of Painting in Brazil, at Masp
2001 - São Paulo SP - Trajectory of Light in Brazilian Art, at Itaú Cultural
2002 - Niterói RJ - Brazilian Art on Paper: 19th and 20th Centuries, at Solar do Jambeiro
2002 - São Paulo SP - Image and Identity: A Look at History in the Museu de Belas Artes Collection, at Instituto Cultural Banco Santos
2003 - Curitiba PR - Victor Meirelles: An Artist of the Empire, at Museu Oscar Niemeyer
Source: Itaú Cultural
