Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro: the Lisbon cartoonist who invented Zé Povinho

On 12 June 1875, the eve of the feast of Saint Anthony, Lisbon's patron saint, readers who opened the fifth issue of A Lanterna Mágica found the government dressed up for the festival. Across the two centre pages the head of the government, António Maria Fontes Pereira de Melo, sat on a popular throne as the saint. On his lap, wearing a little crown, sat King Luís I as the infant Jesus.2 sources2 sources

Fontes's finance minister, António de Serpa, went round collecting money for the saint's candles, while the head of the city council stood guard with a whip. The man handing over his coins was new. He was a stocky countryman in a broad hat, and on one trouser leg the artist had written “Your Zé Povinho”.1 source1 source

Zé is the familiar form of José, and povinho means “the little people”. The figure came back again and again in the artist's papers for almost thirty years: the ordinary Portuguese who footed the bill, watched the politicians come and go, and said it was always the same.3 sources3 sources

The artist was Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, 29 years old, born on Rua da Fé in Lisbon on 21 March 1846. Within ten weeks of drawing Zé Povinho he was on a ship to Brazil. In a career of 35 years he founded eight satirical papers, drew nearly every Portuguese politician of his day, and in his late thirties became a potter whose designs are still in production.5 sources5 sources

Rafael was the third son of Manuel Maria Bordalo Pinheiro, a civil servant who painted, sculpted and engraved, and Maria Augusta Prostes. There were eight children. His brother Columbano, 11 years younger, became one of the leading Portuguese painters of his time and has an article of his own.3 sources3 sources

He was a restless student. He tried the stage as a young actor and attended the Lisbon Academy of Fine Arts on and off between 1861 and 1871 without finishing. In 1866 he married Elvira Ferreira de Almeida against her parents' wishes. Their son, Manuel Gustavo, born in 1867, later drew alongside him.3 sources3 sources

His first caricatures were of writers and actors. In 1870 he published O Calcanhar de Aquiles (“Achilles' heel”), an album of etched caricatures of Lisbon's literary men. He also began A Berlinda, loose lithographed sheets on politics, and broke it off for O Binóculo, a theatre weekly that ran to four issues and was sold inside the theatres. A Berlinda's seventh and last sheet, in 1871, mocked the government's ban on the Casino Conferences, lectures given by young radicals such as Antero de Quental and Eça de Queirós.4 sources4 sources

In March 1873 the Illustrated London News sent him to Spain to draw the war between Carlists and Liberals, and he contributed to the Madrid weekly El Mundo Cómico. The London paper invited him to move to England. He turned it down.3 sources3 sources

A Lanterna Mágica first came out on 15 May 1875. Its texts were signed Gil Vaz, a shared pen name of the poets Guilherme de Azevedo and Guerra Junqueiro. It began as a weekly selling in the streets for 60 réis, and on 1 July, with issue 8, it became an evening daily of four large pages.1 source1 source

Zé Povinho was its lasting invention. In later issues he sat on the ground, legs splayed, as railway fares went up and the primary schools starved. Bordalo drew him as a broad, bearded peasant, slow and easily fooled. Now and then he was provoked into the manguito, a rude arm gesture of defiance, and a cry of “Toma!” (“Take that!”).3 sources3 sources

The historian João Medina, one of the main scholars of the figure, calls him the national stereotype, a self-caricature in which the Portuguese have long recognised themselves.1 source1 source

The paper lasted little more than two and a half months. Bordalo suspended it on 31 July 1875 and, to the surprise of his friends, sailed for Rio de Janeiro on 19 August.2 sources2 sources

Brazil, the former colony, was the favourite destination of Portuguese emigrants, and its cities were big buyers of Portuguese books and papers. Manuel Rodrigues Carneiro Júnior, owner of the Rio comic weekly O Mosquito, hired Bordalo while he was still in Lisbon. His first drawing appeared in issue 313, on 11 September 1875, and told the story of his own voyage. In 1876 his wife and daughter joined him; Manuel Gustavo stayed with his grandparents.3 sources3 sources

He drew the Emperor Pedro II submitting to Pope Pius IX like a schoolboy holding out his hand for the cane. He also invented Manel Trinta Botões, “Manuel Thirty Buttons”, a Portuguese immigrant in clogs, in answer to a Brazilian deputy's speech about Portuguese immigrants. Irisalva Moita, a curator of Lisbon's municipal museums, writes that Bordalo himself paraded through Rio in a blue jacket with three rows of ten mother-of-pearl buttons.2 sources2 sources

After a quarrel with Carneiro he launched papers of his own: Psitt!!! in 1877, which ran to nine issues, and O Besouro (“The Beetle”), 49 weekly issues between 6 April 1878 and 8 March 1879. Their pages carried a long, angry exchange of open letters with the cartoonist Angelo Agostini.3 sources3 sources

O Besouro's owners dispensed with him in March 1879. Moita writes that enemies he made in Rio twice tried to kill him, and that with his wife pressing to leave he went home. She dates his arrival to August 1879, but he was in Lisbon by early June. Because he came from a city struck by yellow fever, he was held in quarantine at the lazaretto across the Tagus from Lisbon. He turned the experience into a comic book, No Lazareto de Lisboa.5 sources5 sources

On 12 June 1879, four years to the day after Zé Povinho's debut, Bordalo launched O António Maria. The title was a joke on António Maria Fontes Pereira de Melo, his favourite target. It came out on Thursdays at 60 réis, eight pages with the front, back and centre spread given over to his drawings, and sold on average 7,000 copies.2 sources2 sources

He kept that promise. The paper went after both rotating parties, the king, the Church and the way elections were bought. In 1883 he drew a Last Supper with Zé Povinho in the place of Christ, which took him to court. The lawsuits piled up so fast that he joked he was opening an office at the Boa-Hora courthouse.2 sources2 sources

Alongside it he published the Álbum das Glórias, 42 portrait-caricatures of statesmen, writers, actors and institutions, most of them between 1880 and 1883, with texts by Guilherme de Azevedo and Ramalho Ortigão. Ortigão's entry on Zé Povinho, in September 1882, called him “the Sovereign” and foresaw a day when he might change his name from Zé Povinho to simply the People.2 sources2 sources

From March 1881 governments answered growing discontent with restrictions on the press, and in 1884 a reform of the penal code tightened them further. At a meeting of journalists Bordalo proposed that every paper close for eight days in protest. Someone smiled that a weekly would lose nothing by it. He replied in the issue of 21 January 1885.1 source1 source

In his farewell he said he belonged to no camp. The monarchists called him a revolutionary and the republicans called him a sell-out, so he would be “simply a worker”.1 source1 source

“For ever” lasted three and a half months. On 7 May 1885 Bordalo launched Pontos nos ii, Portuguese for “dots on the i's”. Its opening programme was spoken by Maria, “the widow of António”, who announced that her mourning was over and that she would go on laughing at everything, as she had during “a honeymoon of six and a half years” with her late husband.2 sources2 sources

The old woman in a headscarf, Maria da Paciência (“Mary of Patience”), became the paper's emblem and was perhaps Zé Povinho's wife. The targets did not change: Fontes, now drawn with a crown that seemed to grow out of his body, and the civil governor Peito de Carvalho, reduced to a starched shirt front.1 source1 source

Its angriest pages came after January 1890, when an ultimatum from Britain, Portugal's oldest ally, inflicted what Paulo Henriques calls a huge national humiliation, a story told in our article on the British Ultimatum. From then on John Bull, the cartoon Englishman, was Zé Povinho's tormentor, and in Caldas Bordalo made him into a chamber pot.3 sources3 sources

On 31 January 1891 a republican revolt in Porto failed, as our article on the Porto revolt tells. Five days later Pontos nos ii, issue 293, opened with a leader headed “Glória aos vencidos!”, glory to the vanquished.2 sources2 sources

Moita writes that these pages, with a text by the writer Fialho de Almeida, led the civil governor to suspend the paper. On 5 March 1891 Bordalo revived O António Maria for a second series, which ran until July 1898. Disillusioned by the public's apathy after the Ultimatum, he turned more to the theatre, the opera and Lisbon society.2 sources2 sources

Bordalo came to ceramics in his late thirties. In 1883 and 1884 he painted his first plates at the Sacavém factory near Lisbon, then the most modern in the country, and at the Gomes de Avelar works in Caldas da Rainha. In October 1883 the articles of a new company, the Fábrica de Faianças das Caldas da Rainha, were approved, and the deed was signed on 9 August 1884. His brother Feliciano ran the business, and Rafael was in charge of everything technical and artistic.3 sources3 sources

Caldas, a spa town north of Lisbon, had a long tradition of glazed clay figures and jugs. From the 1850s the potter Manuel Cipriano Gomes Mafra had added the relief leaves, fish and reptiles of the French Renaissance potter Bernard Palissy, and was made a supplier to the royal household. Bordalo built on both.1 source1 source

The factory made bricks and roof tiles from 1884, decorative faience from the middle of 1885 and tableware from 1888. Bordalo and his modellers worked from nature: cabbage leaves, loquats, lizards, frogs, sardines and dried cod. Some pieces imitated whole objects, such as a wicker basket of fish or a top hat with gloves. He also trained apprentices, in a link with the town's industrial school.1 source1 source

He brought his cartoon cast with him. Zé Povinho, Maria da Paciência, fishwives, priests, policemen and politicians became whistles, bottles, inkwells and wobbling figures with loose heads. A moneylender became a spittoon.1 source1 source

The showpieces won prizes. At the Paris Exposition of 1889 he decorated the Portuguese pavilion, and France gave him the Legion of Honour. King Carlos bought his Talha Manuelina, a great jar topped by a little Manueline temple, in 1893. A Beethoven jug 2.8 metres tall, made between 1896 and 1898, was too big for the patron's house, so Bordalo took it to Rio de Janeiro and gave it to the president of Brazil.1 source1 source

The business was often short of money. Paulo Henriques, who wrote the museum's essay on the factory, refers to serious financial crises, and in 1896 Bordalo dedicated an elaborate censer to a man who had helped him through one of them. He never gave up drawing either: the factory and the papers ran side by side for twenty years.3 sources3 sources

On 17 January 1900 he launched his last paper, A Paródia, at 20 réis, with his son Manuel Gustavo as co-owner and chief helper. Its first editorial called it “caricature in the service of the great public grief”. In its early years it printed close to 25,000 copies, with four pages in colour.3 sources3 sources

The cast changed. In a series of nine drawings politics was “the Great Sow”, finance “the Great Dog”, the economy “the Brooding Hen”, parliamentary rhetoric “the Great Parrot” and national progress “the Great Crab”. Zé Povinho appeared less often. In December 1902 the paper was seized over a drawing of King Carlos by Manuel Gustavo; a judge later annulled the seizure and awarded damages.1 source1 source

In 1903 Bordalo was given a banquet at the Teatro D. Maria II. On 11 June that year he drew himself twice in A Paródia: the haughty young dandy of O António Maria in 1879, and the tired old man of twenty years later, meeting in the street like strangers, one asking the other for a light.2 sources2 sources

He died at home in the Largo da Abegoaria, now Largo Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, on 23 January 1905, aged 58, just back from Porto, where he had worked on the carnival decorations. Manuel Gustavo kept A Paródia going until 1907.2 sources2 sources

The Regenerator leader Hintze Ribeiro, one of Bordalo's most frequent victims, came to the funeral. Asked why, he is said to have answered that when he wanted to remember his political life, he leafed through Bordalo's pages.3 sources3 sources

The factory did not stay in the family. Manuel Gustavo ran it from 1906 to 1908, but it was mortgaged, a court ordered its seizure and Manuel Godinho Leal bought it at auction. After a long fight in the courts Manuel Gustavo recovered his father's moulds, and on 5 November 1908 he opened a new Bordalo Pinheiro factory in Caldas with workers from the old one.2 sources2 sources

The museum came from an admirer. Artur Ernesto Santa Cruz Magalhães (1864 to 1928), a poet, critic and collector, commissioned a villa on Campo Grande from the architect Álvaro Machado in 1913 and opened it to the public as a museum of Bordalo's work on 6 August 1916. He gave the building and collection to Lisbon City Council in 1924. In 1920 Manuel Gustavo left it Columbano's portrait of his father.2 sources2 sources

Building work next door damaged the villa in 1999 and it closed for repairs, reopening in 2005. Since 2016, its centenary year, it has been run by EGEAC, the city's cultural venues company.1 source1 source

The Caldas company, which dates itself to 1884, reached the twenty-first century close to insolvency. In 2009 it was bought by the Visabeira group, which also owns the Vista Alegre porcelain brand. By 2018 its administrator was reporting fast growth, and the company was enlarging its works. Contemporary artists including Joana Vasconcelos and Paula Rego have made pieces for the brand, some of them reworking his designs.2 sources2 sources

Zé Povinho outlived his creator and the monarchy he was drawn to mock. In 2026 the Museu Bordalo Pinheiro marked his 150 years with the exhibition Toma!, which followed him from the comic papers to the stage, popular ceramics, advertising and political posters, postage stamps and trademarks, and on to the national football team, which used him as a mascot.1 source1 source

His papers are a running record of Portuguese politics from 1870 to 1905, and the museum and Lisbon's municipal newspaper library have put them online. His cabbage-leaf dishes sit in so many Portuguese homes that they pass for something typically Portuguese.2 sources2 sources