Hamlet’s Vision

Pedro Américo · 1893

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Pedro Américo

Brazil · 1843–1905

Pedro Américo de Figueiredo e Melo was a Brazilian novelist, poet, scientist, art theorist, essayist, philosopher, politician and professor, best remembered as one of the most important academic painters in Brazil. He showed an inclination towards the arts from a young age, being considered a child prodigy. Before the age of ten, he participated as a draftsman on an expedition of naturalists through the Brazilian northeast, and received government support to study at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. He furthered his artistic studies in Paris, but he also dedicated himself to science and philosophy. Soon after his return to Brazil, he began to teach at the academy and began a successful career, gaining prominence with great paintings of a civic and heroic character, inserting himself in the civilizing and modernizing program of the country fostered by emperor Pedro II, of which the Imperial Academy was the regulatory and executive arm in the artistic sphere.

Independent artist guide by Momentable. Biography from Wikipedia; artworks credited to the museums that hold them.

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Hamlet’s Vision — The living window: art moves here the way it moves in your living room.

life: 1843–1905life
rights: Public domainrights

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How Pedro Américo worked

From the record of their own practice.

Américo possessed a sophisticated technique, paid great attention to detail and was quick to work. He was always an academic, but a versatile and eclectic one in the most influential and most contradictory phase of international academicism, which defined itself as a complex mixture of classical, romantic and realist references. But Brazilian Romanticism in painting, where Pedro Américo is included, was that of the third romantic generation, when the movement had already lost its original, passionate and revolutionary character, transforming itself into a softer and more conformist, more aesthetic and sentimental current, which quickly became bourgeois and in many ways genuinely "popular". Among the artists who were possibly an influence on Américo's most important works are Horace Vernet, Antoine-Jean Gros, Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault and François Gérard, as well as the Italian painters of the Risorgimento, such as Luigi Bechi.