Considerations about the representation of black people in the work Almeida Junior

Abstract

The “paulist” painter Jose Ferraz de Almeida Junior (1850-1899) became known, above all, by paintings that bring the peasant as protagonist, a not much explored character by the Brazillian pictorical production. However, on the contrary of some of his contemporary, like Modesto Brocos, it is almost inexistent the presence of black characters on his paintings. And it is just this near absence that we will approach then. We will investigate two of the few Almeida Junior’s works, in which appears, or nearly disappears, the black person, in order to understand the discursive fragments produced about him. They are: A Negra, in which the proximity given to the human figure in relation to the spectator seems to stress the total light absence of this little dimensioned paint; as like Partida da Monção, historical ordered painting, in which the black character appears in detach.