Arcadópolis
Scene of Adolfo Pinto’s Family
What you see
On the right, the father, in a black suit, leans back in a chair reading, beside a piano and a cello. On a red sofa, the mother sews, with a girl on one side and a boy looking at an album on the other. On the rug, a girl in white holds a baby next to a little one dressed in blue. On the left, an open door looks onto a sunny garden.
Light pours in through the door, and the wooden floor is striped with light and shadow. The reds of the sofa and rug stand out against the dark wall. Keep an eye out for the busts and plants on the piano, the gilded frames, and the overturned basket of clothes in the lower left corner.
About José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior
José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior was born in 1850 in Itu, in inland São Paulo, and studied at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro and then, with a scholarship from Emperor Pedro II, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, from 1876 to 1882. Back in Brazil he devoted himself more and more to the “caipira”, the country people of São Paulo, whom he painted in simple scenes of work and rest under the strong inland light. His “Caipira Cutting Tobacco” had so many imitators that Monteiro Lobato joked that future historians would think Brazilians of the time did nothing but cut tobacco. He died in Piracicaba in 1899.
More by José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior
The Arcadópolis Museum has 443 public-domain works in 40 rooms, free to explore in 3D in your browser.