Arcadópolis
The Viola Player
What you see
A man in a green hat and checked shirt sits sideways in a window frame, eyes closed, playing a viola. Outside, on the right, a woman in a red polka-dot blouse and striped scarf sings with her mouth open and her head tilted up toward him. The dark interior of the house makes both figures stand out.
The colors are warm: the red blouse, the golden wood of the instrument and the earthen walls, whose cracked plaster reveals the adobe beneath. Look for the loose strings curling from the pegbox, and the player's parted lips, as if he were singing too.
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
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