Duarte, Augusto Rodrigues (1848–1888)

Augusto Rodrigues Duarte (b. 1848; d. 1888), Portuguese-born history painter. Augusto Rodrigues Duarte came to Brazil in 1866 and entered the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under the painter Vítor Meireles. Upon completion of his academic training in the early 1870s, Duarte left Brazil to study in Paris. In 1874 he entered the atelier of the French history painter Jean-Léon Gérôme and shortly thereafter won a second prize in the Paris Salon. He was one of the few nineteenth-century painters in Brazil to portray the Indian as the subject of a monumental history painting, a role traditionally reserved for members of the royal family and military heroes.

His most important artistic achievement was the Indianist painting entitled the Funeral of Atala, which was exhibited at the 1878 Universal Exhibition in Paris. The subject matter of the work borrowed from Chateaubriand's 1826 novel Les Natchez. Duarte's paintings exhibit the influences of the European aesthetic formulas of impressionism, symbolism, and even art nouveau. Beyond history painting, he is also known for his landscapes and genre paintings. He was awarded the title of Knight of the Imperial Order of Roses at the 1884 academic exhibition, where he entered fourteen paintings.

See alsoArt: The Nineteenth Century .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arte no Brasil, vol. 2 (1979), p. 516.

Caren Meghreblian, "Art, Politics and Historical Perception in Imperial Brazil, 1854–1884." Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1990.

Additional Bibliography

Denis, Rafael Cardoso, and Colin Trodd. Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century. Lima: Editorial Milla Batres, 2000.

                              Caren A. Meghreblian