49 Facts About Victor Meirelles

Victor Meirelles de Lima was a Brazilian painter and teacher who is best known for his works relating to his nation's culture and history.

Victor Meirelles specialized in the genre of history painting, and upon winning the Academy's Foreign Travel Award, he spent several years training in Europe.

Victor Meirelles received imperial decorations and was the first Brazilian painter to win admission to the Paris Salon, but was the target of scathing criticism, arousing strong controversies in a period when disputes between academic painters and the early modernists were ignited.

When he returned home, his hobby was the old Cosmorama that Antonio Victor Meirelles had bought for very cheap, and so curious that he [the boy] was, he [Antonio] always fixed some of the pieces when his son broke them, which was common.

At the age of ten, Victor Meirelles did not escape lithograph prints: as many as he could get his hands on, he copied them all.

In 1843, when he was between 10 and 11 years old, Victor Meirelles began to receive instruction from Father Joaquim Gomes d'Oliveira e Paiva, who taught him French and philosophy and deepened his knowledge of Latin.

Victor Meirelles's precocious talent was noticed and encouraged by his family and local authorities, and in 1845 he began to take regular classes with a professor of geometric design, Argentine engineer Mariano Moreno, who was a doctor of law and theology, as well as a journalist, politician and former secretary of the first Government Board of the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata, playing, according to Teresinha Franz, "an important role in the construction of the Argentine identity".

In June 1853, at the age of 21, Victor Meirelles landed in Le Havre, France.

Victor Meirelles passed briefly through Paris and then settled in Rome, his original destination.

Consoni was rigorous, but Victor Meirelles made good use of the live model sessions, essential for the refinement of anatomical drawing, an essential element in the genre of historical painting, the most prestigious in the academic system.

Victor Meirelles's performance was so good that the Brazilian government decided to renew his scholarship for another three years in 1856, in addition to indicating to the artist a list of new specific studies that he should complete.

Victor Meirelles tried, on the recommendation of Araujo Porto-Alegre, at the time director of the Academy and his main mentor, to be admitted as a student of Paul Delaroche, but the master suddenly died, so he had to look for another direction, finding it in Leon Cogniet, an equally celebrated romantic painter, member of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and a reference for foreigners who were going to study in Europe.

Victor Meirelles then studied with Andre Gastaldi, who was almost the same age as Meirelles, but who had a more advanced view of art and gave him important instruction in colors.

Victor Meirelles's routine, according to reports, was almost monastic, devoting himself entirely to art, and again his studies were considered so good that his scholarship was extended again for another two years.

Victor Meirelles exhibited A Primeira Missa no Brasil and, among many honors, received from emperor Pedro II the Imperial Order of the Rose in the rank of knight.

Victor Meirelles stayed there for some time and returned to Rio de Janeiro, where he was appointed Honorary Professor of the Academy, being promoted shortly after to Interim Professor, and later assuming the chair of historical painting.

Testimonies from students declare their respect for Victor Meirelles, attesting to his impeccable character and his dedication to teaching, being considered an attentive, patient teacher and truly interested in the progress of his disciples.

Victor Meirelles's fame was consolidated and from this time dates the work Moema, one of the best known works of Brazilian indianism, but in its first exhibition it did not attract interest.

Nevertheless, Victor Meirelles received commissions from the imperial family, painting the Wedding of Princess Isabel and a portrait of the emperor in 1864, as well as portraits of members of the nobility and politicians.

Victor Meirelles became known for his devotion to national causes, which is why he was hired in 1868 by the imperial government to paint about the Paraguayan War, which was in full swing, in a contract that both honored him and gave him good remuneration.

Immediately Victor Meirelles moved to the conflict region to gather impressions of the landscape and the military environment.

Victor Meirelles set up a workshop aboard the ship Brasil, the flagship of the Brazilian fleet, and spent months there drawing up sketches for his works.

In 1883 Victor Meirelles was back in Europe, where he made a new version of Combate Naval de Riachuelo, which had been lost, and in Belgium he began, in 1885, to paint the Panorama do Rio de Janeiro, a view taken from the Santo Antonio hill.

In 1889, with the Proclamation of the Republic in Brazil, the official artists of the monarchy were politically persecuted and in 1890 Victor Meirelles was early dismissed from the Imperial Academy, now transformed into the National School of Fine Arts.

Victor Meirelles set up another exhibition pavilion on a farm in the former Sao Jose Seminary, at the back of the Carmo Convent, but the panoramas were no longer new and attracted fewer and fewer people.

Victor Meirelles still had the idea of exhibiting them in Europe again, trying to gain the government's interest, but the plan came to nothing.

Disappointed, poor and abandoned, on the morning of a Carnival Sunday, on 22 February 1903, Victor Meirelles died at the age of 71, in the simple house where he lived.

The artist was married to Rosalia Fraga, who already had a son from a previous marriage, whom Victor Meirelles adopted, but he left no direct descendants and nothing is known about his private life.

Victor Meirelles's widow donated her estate to the National School of Fine Arts, which held a posthumous exhibition in Meirelles honor.

Victor Meirelles flourished at a critical moment in Brazilian history.

The Imperial Academy, where Victor Meirelles was educated, was one of the executive arms of this civilizing program, which sought to move away from the memory of colonial times under Portuguese rule through affiliation to other models of culture, such as France and Italy, where many painters were sent to improve their skills.

Victor Meirelles developed an eclectic style, and it has been difficult for recent critics to agree on his exact characterization.

From all these schools Victor Meirelles collected subsidies for the formation of his personal style.

Victor Meirelles did not become famous for his religious works, which are few, conservative and of secondary importance, and even though he was personally a devout Catholic, he was artistically committed to the proposal of a secular and progressive society, where art had an important civic and pedagogical role to fulfill, but the group's ideals of purity, unblemished life and hard and honest work left their marks on Victor Meirelles personality and work.

Indeed, in the academic system, copying works by established masters of the past and present was an essential part of training, and Victor Meirelles left many in this category.

Victor Meirelles was one of the most brilliant graduates of the Imperial Academy and one of the first Brazilian painters to receive recognition abroad.

Victor Meirelles was the teacher of many painters who would later make a name for themselves, among them Antonio Parreiras, Belmiro de Almeida, Decio Villares, Eliseu Visconti, Oscar Pereira da Silva, Joao Zeferino da Costa, Modesto Brocos y Gomez, Rafael Frederico, Rodolfo Amoedo, Pedro Peres and Almeida Junior.

Victor Meirelles made many opponents, who considered him outdated and saw in academic conventions nothing but artificiality and empty rhetoric of meaning for the changing times.

At the time Victor Meirelles heard it all, being called a genius and a master to a fake and incompetent, signaling the moment in which his career begins to decline.

Victor Meirelles had a personal concern with the educational function of art, in addition to seeing it as a great means of disseminating Brazil abroad, which was in line with the government's official program.

Victor Meirelles figure was revived with more force after the centenary celebrations of his birth, in 1932, when he was hailed as a humanist, a martyr and a painter of the Brazilian soul.

Victor Meirelles was biographed by Carlos Rubens, Argeu Guimaraes, Angelo de Proenca Rosa and others, and the Victor Meirelles Museum, located in his hometown, is dedicated to preserving his memory, in addition to the Santa Catarina Art Museum maintaining a National Salon that bears his name.

In 2006 the Victor Meirelles Museum began a project that aims to systematically survey and catalog his complete work.

Victor Meirelles participated in this concept of modernity situated between the eternal and the fleeting, in the conviviality of Paris, 'capital of the 19th century'.

Victor Meirelles left a small village - Nossa Senhora do Desterro, where with basic notions of geometric design he managed to register his city.

Victor Meirelles was a student and teacher at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, participated in the formation of a generation of painters, wrote about his own work, justifying it, explaining it, argued critically several times, placed advertisements in newspapers, but above all, he painted his entire life, in Europe and Brazil.

Victor Meirelles traveled a lot, [he] knew a lot about the art of his time.

Victor Meirelles knew how to take advantage of the construction of the landscape, in the detailing of the portraits.

Victor Meirelles glimpsed in the panoramas the possibility of showing his great art, scandalously monumental even in today's eyes.