Pedro Américo de Figueiredo e Melo (29 April 1843 – 7 October 1905) was a Brazilian novelist, poet, scientist, art theorist, essayist, philosopher, politician and professor, best remembered as one of the most important academic painters in Brazil. He showed an inclination towards the arts from a young age, being considered a child prodigy. Before the age of ten, he participated as a draftsman on an expedition of naturalists through the Brazilian northeast, and received government support to study at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. He furthered his artistic studies in Paris, but he also dedicated himself to science and philosophy. Soon after his return to Brazil, he began to teach at the academy and began a successful career, gaining prominence with great paintings of a civic and heroic character, inserting himself in the civilizing and modernizing program of the country fostered by emperor Pedro II, of which the Imperial Academy was the regulatory and executive arm in the artistic sphere.
His style in painting, in line with the great trends of his time, fused neoclassical, romantic and realistic elements, and his production is one of the first great expressions of Academicism in Brazil in its heyday, leaving works that remain alive in the collective imagination of the nation to this day, such as Batalha de Avaí, Fala do Trono, Independência ou Morte! and Tiradentes Esquartejado, reproduced in school books across the country. In the second half of his career, he concentrated on oriental, allegorical and biblical themes, which he personally preferred and whose market was expanding, but this part of his work, popular at the time, quickly went out of fashion, and did not receive much attention from specialists in recent times remaining little known.
He spent his career between Brazil and Europe, receiving favors from critics and the public but also raising controversies and creating tenacious opponents. For the new avant-gardes of his time, Pedro Américo was a painter of gifts.
He acquired an intellectual sophistication quite unusual for Brazilian artists of his time, taking an interest in a wide variety of subjects and seeking solid preparation. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences from the Sorbonne and a PhD in Natural Sciences from the Free University of Brussels. He was director of the antiquities and numismatics section of the Imperial and National Museum; professor of drawing, aesthetics and art history at the Imperial Academy, and constituent deputy for Pernambuco. He left a large written production on aesthetics, art history and philosophy, where, inspired by the classical model, he gave special attention to education as the basis of all progress and reserved a superior role for art in the evolution of humanity. He won several honors and decorations, including the title of Historical Painter of the Imperial Chamber, the Order of the Rose and the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. He also left some poetry and four novels, but like his theoretical texts, they are little remembered today.
Biography
Early life
Pedro Américo was the son of the merchant Daniel Eduardo de Figueiredo and Feliciana Cirne; he was the brother of the also painter Francisco Aurélio de Figueiredo e Melo. His family was linked to the arts, although they did not have many resources, and from an early age he found at home the necessary stimulus for the development of an early talent. His father was a violinist and introduced him to music, as well as introducing him to drawing by giving him books on famous artists.
Pedro Américo drew very well and soon the fame of the little prodigy spread throughout the city. When a scientific expedition arrived there in 1852, its organizer, naturalist Louis Jacques Brunet, went to visit him and was able to appreciate a series of copies of classic works made by the boy, who was not yet ten years old. Wanting to test him to prove the skill that was claimed, Brunet got some objects and had Pedro Américo draw them in his presence; Américo was able to reproduce them with great resemblance. Impressed, Brunet decided to hire Américo as the expedition's draftsman, so the little artist accompanied the Frenchman on a twenty-month trip across much of northeastern Brazil. In 1854, at the age of eleven, provided with several letters of recommendation, Américo was admitted to the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, in Rio de Janeiro, but could not join immediately. Before that he spent a season at Pedro II College studying Latin, French, Portuguese, arithmetic, drawing and music, standing out among his colleagues for his dedication and intelligence. His letters to his family reveal a student aware of his responsibilities, and he already had a desire, still uncertain, to dedicate himself to historical painting.
Joining the academy's Industrial Design course in 1856, his progress was equally brilliant, winning 15 medals in drawing, geometry and live model, being nicknamed papa-medalhas (medal earner) by the director of the institution, artist and scholar Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre, who would be an important influence on him, and his future father-in-law. Even before finishing the course, Américo obtained a pension from emperor Pedro II to go and study in Europe. Shortly before boarding, he developed an illness diagnosed as "lead colic", supposedly an intoxication by the paints he used, and which would accompany him throughout his life.
After a painful and bumpy journey, he arrived in Paris in mid-May 1859, immediately scouring the city's museums, monuments, palaces and art galleries. At the same time, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, being a disciple of Ingres, Léon Cogniet, Hippolyte Flandrin and Sébastien-Melchior Cornu. According to his scholarship contract, he was required to strictly obey the discipline of the academy and regularly send works to Brazil to attest to his progress, including studies of living models and copies of works by renowned masters, including Guido Reni and Théodore Géricault. He won two first-class prizes, but was not interested in the great academic halls, which he considered unrepresentative.
As he had other cultural interests besides art, during his stay in Paris Américo also studied at the Institute of Physics of Adolphe Ganot and in the Archeology Course of Charles Ernest Beulé. Américo graduated in Social Sciences at the Sorbonne, delving into architecture, theology, literature and philosophy, and attended classes by Victor Cousin, Claude Bernard and Michael Faraday at the Collège de France and the Conservatory of Arts and Crafts. During this period, he wrote many essays on the relationship between art, science and social progress, a theme on which he would defend his thesis. In 1862 he went to Belgium, enrolling at the Free University of Brussels, but rarely attending classes. All these studies profoundly marked his character and thought, and he began to dedicate himself to classical studies and to be concerned with the artist's civil responsibility and his political commitment. There he began to organize his synthetic philosophy, where the arts were, for him, the true promoters of social progress, and should be cultivated on a humanist basis, mirroring the example of the classical Greeks and the Renaissance. At this time, he also visited the Salon des Refusés, in Paris, where they exhibited artists who remained outside the official circuit, which was important in bringing him into contact with the pre-modernist avant-gardes.
At a certain point, he ended up in financial difficulties, but managed to supplement his academic pension with help from the Provincial Assembly of Paraíba in 1863. In 1864, visiting Scotland by boat, he was saved from a shipwreck. In the same year he returned to Brazil, recalled back by the emperor to participate in a competition for professor of Figurative Drawing in the Industrial Design course at the Imperial Academy. He won it with the work Sócrates afastando Alcebíades dos braços do vício, but did not assume the chair. Américo visited his hometown, which he would recreate in his novels, where he found a brother who was born in the year of his departure and worried about the poverty of his relatives. Back in Rio de Janeiro, he published a pioneering series of essays on aesthetics and art history in the journal Correio Mercantil, but soon after, asking for leave without pay, he returned to Europe.
In 1865 he wandered, largely on foot, through several countries. He began his journey from Paris to Strasbourg, then to the Grand Duchy of Baden, the Netherlands and Denmark. He then continued through Morocco, Sicily, the Greek islands, and Algeria, which was something of a Mecca for many painters of his generation who were interested in exotic settings. There he worked as a draftsman for the French government, making records of human types, landscapes and animals in the region. The publication, in French, of his first novel, Holocausto, which was only translated to Portuguese in 1882, dates from this time. His finances were tight again, he went hungry and had to make drawings and portraits in cafes to survive. Receiving a gold medal at the Imperial Academy for the painting A Carioca, a nude refused by emperor Pedro, to whom it had been offered. Americo asked a friend in Rio de Janeiro to sell the prize, with whose money he could support himself for a while longer.
In 1868, he defended the thesis Science and Systems: Questions of Natural History and Philosophy at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Brussels, obtaining the degree of Doctor of Natural Sciences, approved with merit and appointed in January of the following year as an adjunct professor. The approval was reported in several Brazilian and Belgian newspapers in extremely laudatory terms, assuming the character of a scientific event, and according to his first biographer, he was awarded the Order of the Holy Sepulcher, granted by Pope Pius IX. The paintings São Marcos, Visão de São Paulo and Cabeça de São Jerônimo date from this period. At the same time, the Brazilian government pressured him to return and take up his professorship at the Imperial Academy.
Return to Brazil and fame
Relenting to the government's requests, Américo returned to Brazil in 1869, first passing through Portugal, where at the end of the year he married Carlota de Araújo Porto-Alegre (1844–1918), daughter of Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre, then Brazilian consul in Lisbon. With her he would later have three children. He arrived in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1870s and began to dedicate himself to painting mythological and historical canvases and portraits. At the Imperial Academy he taught archeology, art history and aesthetics. He also wrote, directed the numismatics and archeology sections of the Imperial and National Museum, and made caricatures for the periodical A Comédia Social.
But when he returned from Europe, he was still an unknown painter to Brazilians. A teaching career did not offer many prospects for fame and fortune, the Brazilian art market was still incipient, and it appears that he had a difficult, proud and self-sufficient personality, which earned him several disaffections. However, taking advantage of the wave of patriotism unleashed by the Brazilian victory in the Paraguayan War, and encouraged by the emperor, he painted the canvas Batalha do Campo Grande, a large-scale composition in which he sought to praise the monarchy and the main hero in the battle, the Count of Eu. Gaining the support of the press, he organized an intense promotional campaign for his work. Between August and September 1871, almost not a day passed without newspapers from Rio de Janeiro talking about the artist or the canvas, which was visited by more than 60,000 people.