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(b Vercelli, Italy, 1843; d Rio de Janeiro, 1910).

Brazilian caricaturist and painter. He came to Brazil in 1859, having already acquired some knowledge of painting in Paris. He settled initially in São Paulo, where he at once started to publish caricatures attacking black slavery. There, in 1864, he was one of the founders of the comic newspaper O Diabo Coxo. His abolitionist spirit continued after he moved to Rio de Janeiro, through his frequent collaboration in periodicals such as A Vida Fluminense, O Mosquito, Don Quixote, and O Malho. In the Revista Ilustrada he began to publish in 1884 the first long-running strip cartoon in Brazil, the adventures of Zé Caipora, a sertão (hinterland) character, depicting a lesser-known side of Brazil. As a painter he specialized in landscapes but also produced portraits with the same fervor that fired his enjoyable and impassioned satirical drawings, for example Portrait of the Writer Joaquin Augusto Ribeiro de Sousa (c. 1890...

(b Marseille; d after 1912).

Italian sculptor and teacher, active in France and Mexico. He began his career in Marseille as a sculptor of the French school, and in 1888 he received an honorable mention at the Salon des Artistes Français, where he exhibited regularly until 1913. He probably moved to Mexico at the end of 1889. He won critical acclaim for his first works there, marble and bronze busts of important Mexican figures. In 1891 the government commissioned him to create statues of national heroes and dignitaries for the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City; the statue of Col. Miguel López was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, IL, in 1893 and at the World’s Fair in Atlanta, GA, in 1895, winning prizes on both occasions. This was Alciati’s most dramatic and realist work, and the influence of Rodin is clear. In 1895 he was appointed professor of sculpture, decoration, and modeling at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City. At the turn of the century he was commissioned to create, under the direction of ...

(b Itu, 1850; d Piracicaba, 1899).

Brazilian painter. With the financial help of family and friends, as a young man Almeida Júnior moved to Rio de Janeiro to study art in 1869. He attended the Academia Imperial das Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, where he studied drawing under Jules Le Chevrel (c. 1810–1872) and painting with Victor Meirelles de Lima. Deeply attached to the interior of the state of São Paulo, where he was born, Almeida Júnior returned there as soon as he had completed his studies in 1874. In 1875 he opened a studio in his hometown of Itu, where he taught drawing and painted portraits. In a trip to the countryside of São Paulo in 1876, the Emperor Peter II (r. 1831–1889) came across Almeida Júnior’s work. Impressed, he offered to pay for him to study in Europe. Under the patronage of the Emperor, Almeida Júnior travelled to Europe in 1876...

(b Cerro, 1858; d Paris, 1935).

Brazilian painter and caricaturist. Brought as a child from the interior of the state of Minas Gerais to Rio de Janeiro, he graduated in 1877 from the Academia Imperial das Belas Artes. By then he had already published his first caricatures in the Rio press, and he continued to be a frequent contributor to such humorous periodicals as O Binóculo, O Rataplan (which he founded in 1886), O Mercúrio, A Bruxa, O Malho, Fon-Fon! and Don Quixote. He first went to Europe in 1888, where he finished his studies with Jules Lefebvre in Paris and travelled to Italy. On his return to Brazil at the beginning of the 1890s, he taught drawing at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, but he spent most of the latter part of his life in Paris. There, despite the underlying academicism from which his work was never entirely free and unlike the majority of Brazilian artists of the time, he showed genuine interest in the avant-garde developments of modernist art....

(b Santiago de Veraguas, Mar 25, 1869; d Panama City, Nov 12, 1952).

Panamanian painter, draftsman, and printmaker. He is known chiefly as the designer of the national flag (1903) of Panama. He studied business administration and had a long career in public office. When Panama became independent in 1903, he became Secretario de Hacienda and in 1904 Consul-General ad honorem to Hamburg. In 1908 he moved to New York, where he studied with Robert Henri, who strongly influenced his style of vigorous drawing, loose brushwork, distorted expressionist images, and somber colors, as in Head Study (1910; Panama City, R. Miró priv. col.; see Miró 1966). He produced most of his work between 1910 and 1914 and again after the late 1930s; his main subject was the human figure, but he also painted portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. On his return to Panama in the 1930s he worked as an auditor in the Contraloría General. After his retirement he resumed painting and produced some of his most passionate works, such as ...

(b Areia, 1843; d Florence, 1905).

Brazilian painter. His precocious talent as a draftsman was recognized as early as 1853, when he accompanied the expedition led by the French naturalist Louis Jacques Brunet to the northeast 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 Sepulcher. 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 ...

(b Paris, Aug 8, 1808; d Paris, Jan 11, 1886).

French painter, draftsman, and diplomat. While serving as French Vice-Consul in Lima (1834–1838), Angrand drew and painted scenes in Peru. His watercolors and sketches captured street views of architecture and social interaction in Arica, Arequipa, Lima, Cuzco, Ollantaytambo, Urubamba, and Tacna. He served as consul to other areas of Latin America (1839–1842 and 1845–1856), traveling to study and visually record ancient sites such as Tiwanaku and Copán among others. Angrand’s archaeological renderings are scientifically precise and accompanied by descriptions. As albums, his contemporary street scenes convey a sense of everyday life in 19th-century Peru, while also providing insight to race and class relations in urban settings.

(b Havana, Dec 15, 1864; d Paris, Aug 17, 1889).

Cuban painter. His works include portraits, history painting, and genre scenes and costumbrist types. In his paintings, Arburu Morell exhibited a facility with the handling of color and light. In Havana, he studied at the Academia de San Alejandro, beginning in 1877, where he excelled in his color composition class. He completed frescoes for the café at Havana’s principal theater, the Teatro Tacón, before traveling to Spain. In 1886, he began studying at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, and he was apprenticed to the Spanish painter Manuel Domínguez. He traveled to Paris in 1889 to attend the Universal Exposition and died there at the age of 25 due to typhus.

He completed his two most well-known works in Spain. In La primera misa en América (1888), he depicted a foundational moment in the history of a once sprawling empire. A much more intimate moment defines his painting En el jardín...

(b Santa Ana Chiautempan, nr. Tlaxcala, Aug 28, 1803; d Puebla, Dec 22, 1874).

Mexican painter. He was one of the first students at the Escuela de Dibujo de la Real Casa de la Academia y Junta de Caridad para la Buena Educación de la Juventud, founded in Puebla in December 1813, which eventually became the Academia de Bellas Artes. In September 1825 he was recommended and hired as a professor there, where he taught, possibly until 1860. In the last years of his life he taught drawing in the Hospicio de Pobres of Puebla. He is the most representative artist of the mid-19th-century Puebla school, both for his teaching and for his abundant production within several pictorial genres (with the exception of landscape painting).

Arrieta concentrated at first on portraits, but c. 1840 he began to specialize in costumbrista paintings and still lifes, for which he acquired a large local clientele. He exhibited paintings of both kinds from 1851 at the academies in Puebla and Mexico City. His genre paintings, like the Flemish and Dutch works from which they are derived, often have a moralizing intention, a characteristic the painter shared with contemporary ...

(b Lima, 1866; d Lima, Jan 12, 1914).

Peruvian painter. He studied at the Academia de S. Fernando in Madrid, where he lived from 1883 to 1893; his friends there included Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, a fellow student. On his return to Lima in 1893 he painted portraits and for fourteen years taught drawing at the Academia Concha. He also worked as an illustrator for the review ...

(b Mariana, Minas Gerais, bapt Oct 18, 1762; d Mariana, Feb 2, 1830).

Brazilian painter. He was the most important painter active in the province of Minas Gerais during the Colonial period. He learnt his craft in the workshop with other artists and from such theoretical treatises as Andrea Pozzo’s Perspectivae pictorum atque architectorum (1693–1700) and such technical manuals as the Segredos necessarios para os officcios, artes e manufaturas (Lisbon, 1794), which was recorded in the inventory of his possessions. He was also strongly influenced by engravings of religious subjects in bibles and missals. He had a great influence on the development of religious painting in the region, especially through his numerous pupils and followers, who until the middle of the 19th century continued to make use of his compositional methods, particularly in the perspective ceilings of churches. Often referred to in documents as ‘professor de pintura’, in 1818 he unsuccessfully petitioned for official permission to found an art school in his native city. He left an extensive body of work, which includes decorative painting of architecture, single pictures, and the painting of religious statues (gilding and flesh-colouring). Especially famous are the vast perspective paintings such as the ...

[Murillo, Gerardo]

(b Guadalajara, Oct 3, 1875; d Mexico City, Aug 14, 1964).

Mexican painter, printmaker, writer, theorist, volcanologist, and politician. Murillo first studied art in his native Guadalajara with the painter Félix Bernardelli (1866–1905). Murillo relocated to Mexico City in 1896, studying briefly at the Academia de San Carlos, before securing support from the government to continue his education in Europe. He stopped briefly in Paris in 1897 before moving on to Rome and beginning his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti and the Real Academia de España. Murillo’s encounters with European art had a profound impact on him, particularly Impressionism. He also achieved a measure of success on the European art scene, and his Self-portrait (1899; priv. col.) was awarded the silver medal at the Paris Salon. During his six-year stay Murillo also became absorbed by French and Italian socialist political theory.

Murillo returned to Mexico in 1904, joining the staff of the Academia de San Carlos, where he became an agitator for reform, clashing with the school’s administration over teaching methods and becoming a hero to students, among them José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The debates culminated in the student strike of ...

(Laforest) [Fougère, Jean-Jacques]

(b Les Cayes, Santo Domingo [now Haiti], April 26, 1785; d New York state, Jan 27, 1851).

American Naturalist, painter and draughtsman of French –Creole descent. Brought up in a French village near Nantes, he developed an interest in art and natural science, encouraged by his father and the naturalist Alcide Dessaline d’Orbigny. He is thought to have moved to Paris by 1802 to pursue formal art training; although the evidence is inconclusive, Audubon claimed to have studied in the studio of Jacques-Louis David.

In 1803 Audubon travelled to the USA to oversee Mill Grove, an estate owned by his father on the outskirts of Philadelphia, PA. Uninterested in practical affairs, he spent his time hunting and drawing birds. His drawings (many in Cambridge, MA, Harvard U., Houghton Lib.) from this period are executed primarily in pencil and pastel. They are conventional specimen drawings that define individual birds in stiff profile with little or no background. A number of these works, however, bear notations from Mark Catesby’s ...

(b São Paulo, Dec 8, 1851; d Guarujá, Jun 13, 1928).

Brazilian architect. He studied at the Escola Militar in Rio de Janeiro (1869–1872) and then trained as an engineer–architect, graduating in 1878 from the University of Ghent, Belgium, under the patronage of the Visconde de Parnaíba, who subsequently provided him with his first commissions in Rio. His architectural education was based on the classicism of the Beaux-Arts tradition, and one of his designs represented his school at the Exposition Internationale (1878) in Paris. He began his career in 1883 in Campinas, where his family had originated, when he completed some unfinished work on the 18th-century parish church; this project became well known for his use of the taipa de pilão (Port.: “pounded gravel wall”) construction techniques of the earlier builders, a considerable engineering feat.

In 1886 Azevedo began to work in São Paulo and designed for the government two neo-Renaissance buildings, the Tesouraria da Fazenda Nacional (...

(b Islay, Arequipa, 1867; d Neuilly-sur-Seine, Feb 20, 1941).

Peruvian painter and draftsman. His family moved to Chile when he was four, and in 1882 he entered the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Santiago. In recognition of his rejection of an offer of Chilean nationality, the Peruvian government invited him to Lima in 1887 to assist him with his studies. In 1890 he went to Paris, continuing on to Rome where he studied under Francisco Pradilla at the Academia Española de Bellas Artes and again in Paris under Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant at the Académie Julien in 1893. In Paris he was commissioned to paint important society and government figures; in 1908 the American banker and collector J. Pierpont Morgan summoned him to New York, where he lived for twenty years, painting 120 portraits. In 1926 he became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and three years later he settled in Paris again. His painting was academically accomplished and realist in style, influenced by Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Hans Holbein. He was a careful observer of detail, and he achieved astonishing physical resemblance to his subjects. The prominent figures he portrayed include ...

(Francisca )

(b East Los Angeles, CA, Sept 20, 1946).

American muralist, activist and teacher. Born to Mexican–American parents, Baca is recognized as one of the leading muralists in the USA. She was involved from a young age in activism, including the Chicano Movement, the antiwar protest and Women’s Liberation. She studied art at California State University, Northridge, where she received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. Baca started teaching art in 1970 in East Los Angeles for the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks and became interested in the ways murals could involve youth, allowing them to express their experiences. She founded the City of Los Angeles Mural Program in 1974, which evolved into the Social and Public Resource Center, a community arts organization, where she served as artistic director. She held five summer mural workshops from 1976 through 1983 for teenagers and community artists to help her paint a huge mural on the ethnic history of Los Angeles, called the ...

(b Mexico, 1863; d Biarritz, Jan 13, 1953).

Spanish collector. His family was of Basque origin, though he was born in Mexico. After making his fortune in Mexico, he spent the last 40 years of his life in Biarritz, and at his villa Zurbiak he built up a substantial art collection. He had been educated partly in Paris, thereafter retaining a love for France; in 1902 he made a donation to the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. His collection of paintings was built up slowly, and he often consulted with museum curators before purchasing works. His tastes were eclectic, covering many periods of art, and determined more than anything by the quality of a work. Often he bought paintings on behalf of the nation so as to prevent them being lost to foreign countries, as was the case with Antoine-Jean Gros’s Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole (1796; Paris, Louvre). His collection was distributed throughout his villa, but for the most distinguished works, those destined for the Louvre, he had a special gallery built. He was a foreign associate of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and a member of the Conseil des Musées Nationaux. After his death 21 important paintings were donated to the ...

(b Guadalajara, 1852; d Rio de Janeiro, 1931).

Brazilian sculptor. The son of Italian musicians and brother of Chilean-born painter Henrique Bernardelli (1857–1936), he spent his childhood in Mexico and Chile before coming to Brazil with his family. In 1870 he was already enrolled in the course on statuary sculpture in the Academia Imperial das Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, from where he was awarded a trip to Europe in 1876. He remained abroad until 1885, lived briefly in Paris from 1878 to 1879, but stayed mainly in Rome, where he finished his studies with Achille Monteverdi. During that time he executed one of his best-known works, the marble Christ and the Adulteress (1884; Rio de Janeiro, Mus. N. B.A.), which bears witness to the persistence in Brazil of a neoclassically based naturalism throughout the 19th century and beyond. He taught in the Academia Imperial, and when this was renamed the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes with the establishment of the Republic, he became its director from ...

(b Mercedes, May 19, 1878; d Montevideo, Jun 22, 1926).

Uruguayan painter. He first studied painting and drawing as a child with the Catalan painter Miguel Jaume i Bosch (1844–1900). As an adolescent he moved with his family to Spain, where he studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid and frequented the workshop of Santiago Rusiñol. After studying in Paris with Benjamin Constant, he visited Italy and Mallorca, where he first developed his talents as a landscape painter before returning briefly to Uruguay in 1899. During another prolonged visit to Europe from 1902 to 1907 he enthusiastically studied the work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Lucien Simon, Henri Martin, Claude Monet, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. After his return to Montevideo in 1907 he painted shimmering Impressionist-influenced landscapes such as Palma de Mallorca (1915; Montevideo, Mus. N. A. Visuales) and treated local rural and urban scenes in which he established himself as a remarkable colorist (see ...

(b Montevideo, Jun 8, 1830; d Pisa, Apr 15, 1901).

Uruguayan painter and draftsman. He came from a humble background and as a child suffered the separation of his parents, a disrupted schooling, poverty, and the social upheavals of Montevideo under siege by General Manuel Oribe during Uruguay’s Guerra grande of 1839–1851. From an early age he showed talent as a draftsman, making life drawings and oil paintings while working as a typographer for El defensor de la independencia americana, a daily newspaper run by the besieging army.

The work produced by Blanes from 1850 to 1860 established him as one of the outstanding portraitists in South America as well as a distinguished painter of murals on historical themes. He supported himself through commissions while living in Montevideo with his wife and children and by teaching painting at the Colegio de Humanidades in Salto after settling there in 1855. His own formal training was limited to that of local artists and to the basic guidelines established by foreign academic and naturalist portrait painters. During these years he did eight paintings of the military victories of the Argentine General Justo José de Urquiza, some paintings on religious themes for the chapel at Urquiza’s palace, and ...