Dictionary of


Art  &  Artist



 

Pedro Americo

 

Américo de (Figueiredo e) Melo Pedro

(b Areia, 1843; d Florence, 1905). Brazilian painter. His precocious talent as a draughtsman was recognized as early as 1853, when he accompanied the expedition led by the French naturalist Louis Jacques Brunet to the north-east of Brazil. He then went to Rio de Janeiro, where he entered the Academia Imperial das Belas Artes in 1855. Under the patronage of Emperor Peter II he lived in France from 1859 to 1864, studying with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Horace Vernet at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His interests also included physics, philosophy and literature. His essay ‘Refutation of the Life of Jesus by Renan’ won him the decoration of the papal order of the Holy Sepulchre. He also painted one of his first important pictures at this time, Carioca (‘Woman from Rio de Janeiro’; 1862; Rio de Janeiro, Mus. N. B.A.). On his return to Brazil he taught drawing (and, later, art history, aesthetics and archaeology) at the Academia Imperial. When the Republic was proclaimed in 1889, he became a member of the constituent assembly.

Moses and Jochebed

A Carioca

The Night with the Genii of Study and Love

Dom Pedro II of Brazil

Pax et Concórdia e Tiradentes esquartejado

Judith thanks Jehovah for being able to free her homeland from Holofernes

Joana D'Arc escuta a voz pela primeira vez
1884

A rabequista árabe