José Malhoa, the painter of O Fado, born in Caldas da Rainha in 1855

One lazy afternoon, José Malhoa was sitting in his studio with his eyes half closed. A Portuguese guitar lay on a bench, and it set him wondering who had sung the very first fado. That, he told the newspaper A Lucta in 1915, was how his most famous painting began.1 source1 source

The Severas of his daydream were versions of Maria Severa, a fado singer who died in Lisbon's Mouraria quarter in 1846, aged 26, and whose life was later retold on stage and screen. Malhoa did not paint a legend in the end. He found two living people from the fado world, the guitarist Amâncio and his lover, known as Adelaide da Facada, and sat them in a cramped room.3 sources3 sources

The result, O Fado, is dated 1910. A century later the Museu do Fado wrote that the picture soon took a central place in the way the song is pictured. Its painter was 55 that year. He had entered art school 43 years before, and for about six of those years he had stopped painting.2 sources2 sources

José Vital Branco Malhoa was born on 28 April 1855 in Caldas da Rainha. He moved to Lisbon when he was eight, and four years later, at 12, he enrolled at the school of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.3 sources3 sources

He stayed from 1867 to 1875. His teachers included the painter Miguel Ângelo Lupi, the sculptors Vítor Bastos and José Simões de Almeida, and the landscape painter Tomás da Anunciação. Malhoa finished the course with merit.2 sources2 sources

The next step for a gifted student was a state grant to study in Paris. Malhoa applied twice and was turned down twice, the second time in 1875. Disheartened, he put his brushes away and went to work in his brother's shop.2 sources2 sources

He was away from painting for about six years. What brought him back was a canvas called A Seara Invadida (The Invaded Cornfield), which was shown in Madrid in 1881 and well reviewed. He went back to his easel and to the Lisbon exhibitions, and showed there almost every year for the rest of his life.2 sources2 sources

Malhoa came back to a Lisbon art scene in motion. In 1880 the painter Silva Porto had brought in plein-air painting: working outdoors, in front of the subject, rather than composing landscapes in the studio. A group of young painters gathered round him and took their name from the place where they met, the Leão de Ouro, a beer cellar on what was then Rua do Príncipe.2 sources2 sources

Malhoa was one of the founders of this Grupo do Leão. From 1881 the group held yearly exhibitions under the name Modern Painting, and Malhoa showed with them until 1889. Their style was naturalism: painting landscapes and everyday people as they looked, in natural light, in a break with the Romantic manner of the older generation.4 sources4 sources

In 1885 Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro painted the whole group for the entrance of the refitted beer hall, a story told in our article on Columbano. In his picture of 14 men around a white table, Malhoa is third from the left, between the painters Ribeiro Cristino and João Vaz. The canvas hung at the brewery until 1945 and is now in the Museu do Chiado, Lisbon's national museum of contemporary art.1 source1 source

His own work of those years was small and quiet. Maria de Aires Silveira, who wrote the Museu do Chiado's catalogue entries on him, describes his first pictures as small, rather melancholy landscapes by a pupil of Anunciação, followed by his first naturalist pieces, painted under Silva Porto's influence at Figueiró dos Vinhos, Aveiro, Praia das Maçãs, Caldas da Rainha and Azenhas do Mar. One of them, a little landscape now in the Museu do Chiado, once belonged to Columbano.1 source1 source

In 1880 he married Juliana Júlia de Carvalho. Almost nothing is known of her origins, and his friends never commented on the marriage. They travelled abroad together and made their home in Lisbon, with stays at Figueiró dos Vinhos. In 1914 he painted her, grey-haired among flowers, her face hidden from the viewer, and in 1919 he gave the picture to the state.1 source1 source

Malhoa divided his life between Lisbon and Figueiró dos Vinhos, a country town in the district of Leiria where he kept a house known as the Casulo, the Cocoon. Figueiró gave him his subjects. Its pilgrimages, processions and drinkers fill his big canvases of the 1900s, painted in strong sunlight and full of detail.2 sources2 sources

Clara, of 1903, is more than two metres tall. A country girl from the Minho wrings out washing beside a field of ripe wheat and looks straight at the painter, while a young man watches from the distance. Malhoa's own label made her one of the heroines of As Pupilas do Senhor Reitor, a novel by Júlio Dinis. The Brazilian banker Guilherme Guinle gave the picture to the Portuguese embassy in Rio de Janeiro, and it reached the Museu do Chiado in 1955.1 source1 source

Festejando o S. Martinho (Celebrating St Martin's Day) of 1907 moved indoors. Six men sprawl round a table in a dark tavern, in every state from apparent clear-headedness to deep sleep. The regedor, the local parish official, is sober and about to eat a sardine on bread. The men were real Figueiró people, later named by António Montês: O Carriço, Jerónimo Godinho, Alfredo Ventura, Júlio Soares Pinto and Julião dos Santos.1 source1 source

The picture was shown in Paris in 1907, in Rio de Janeiro in 1908 and in Lisbon in 1909, and was bought from the artist with money from the Valmor bequest in 1908 or 1909. It has belonged to the Museu do Chiado since 1911. Malhoa kept working on the theme, and a third, more restrained version is dated 1912.2 sources2 sources

In other words, the Portugal in these pictures was partly Malhoa's own invention, a picturesque country of feasts and wine, and it matched what his public wanted to see. Silveira reads the tavern scene and O Fado as a pair: his picture of popular customs in the countryside and in the city.1 source1 source

He could also surprise. Outono (Autumn), a small panel of 1918, is made of a curtain of short, bright brushstrokes. Later critics read it as a deliberate example of post-Impressionist divisionism. Silveira sees a late arrival of the Impressionism of the 1870s and calls it an experiment without consequences, as if Malhoa wanted to prove he could be modern. The Museu Soares dos Reis counts him among the Portuguese painters who came closest to Impressionism.2 sources2 sources

He also took on large official commissions: historical and decorative paintings for the Artillery Museum in Lisbon, the Palácio da Ajuda, the Medical School and Lisbon City Hall. And he painted portraits, such as the one of 1901 of his friend António Novais, the photographer he usually hired to photograph his paintings. A critic called it the best piece in the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes exhibition of 1902.2 sources2 sources

O Fado took years. Studies show that Malhoa first thought of a triptych, a picture in three panels. There are charcoal drawings of Amâncio, and a study of 1908 that adds a third figure to the scene. In the end he kept two people in a poor room: the man in a wide hat, eyes half shut, playing and singing; the woman in a white camisole and red skirt, leaning on her hand and listening.2 sources2 sources

His sitters came from the world he was painting. Amâncio was a guitarist and Adelaide, whose nickname means roughly Adelaide of the Stab, was his lover. The Museu do Fado calls them both fado singers and says that, almost by accident, they helped fix the image of fado; the story of how the picture was made became well known through the large literature on Malhoa.2 sources2 sources

There are two versions. One is dated 1909 and is in a private collection; the other, dated 1910, is the famous one. It was much admired at the time and shown abroad, and it belongs to Lisbon City Council. In 2010, the centenary of the Republic, an exhibition staged by the Museu do Fado at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes showed the two side by side for the first time.2 sources2 sources

The Museu do Fado describes Malhoa's image of fado as popular, urban and macho, and says it soon became central to the way the genre was pictured. The painting has had a long life outside the museum. It inspired Fado Malhoa, a song by José Galhardo and Frederico Valério first sung by Amália Rodrigues. In 2005 the painter João Vieira parodied it in a canvas whose title, taken from the song, calls it the most Portuguese of oil paintings.3 sources3 sources

When the Museu do Fado in Alfama reopened after a refit in 2008, the city deposited Malhoa's picture there, at the start of the new permanent display, and it was still there in the museum's Imagens do Fado exhibition of 2024 and 2025.2 sources2 sources

Abroad, Malhoa showed regularly at the Paris Salon from 1897 to 1912 and at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900, and his work went to Berlin, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, Barcelona, Buenos Aires and San Francisco, winning prizes along the way. At home the new Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes, founded in 1901, gave him its Medal of Honour in 1903 and elected him president in 1918. The MACAM museum and the Museu do Fado say he had also been its first president, in 1901; the Museu Soares dos Reis mentions only the 1918 election.3 sources3 sources

The SNBA, still Portugal's oldest artists' society, was formed by merging the Grémio Artístico, set up in 1891 by Silva Porto and the Grupo do Leão, with the older Sociedade Promotora de Belas-Artes. Malhoa had exhibited with both, and by around 1920 he was one of the masters who gave free classes to its members.3 sources3 sources

Success paid for a house. In 1904 and 1905 the architect Norte Júnior designed a home and studio for Malhoa in Lisbon, on land that was part of the city's planned expansion. The Casa Malhoa was the first artist's house in the capital and won the Valmor Prize, Lisbon's architecture award, in 1905.1 source1 source

In 1928 the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes gave him a large retrospective exhibition, and a José Malhoa Award was created in his name. In 1932 the Lisbon house passed to the doctor and collector António Anastácio Gonçalves, and Malhoa died at Figueiró dos Vinhos on 26 October 1933, aged 78.3 sources3 sources

The idea of a Malhoa museum in Caldas da Rainha came from António Montês, also born in the town, who had wanted since 1924 to bring the painter closer to it. In 1926, at Montês's request, Malhoa gave the town a painting of Queen Leonor, who had founded its thermal hospital, and in 1932 he gave the first pictures for a future museum.2 sources2 sources

The Museu José Malhoa was created by ministerial order in 1933, a few months before he died; a government statement of 2022 calls it a civic initiative. It opened on 28 April 1934, which would have been his 79th birthday, in temporary rooms in the Casa dos Barcos, a boathouse in the town's Parque D. Carlos I. Montês was its first director.3 sources3 sources

Its own building, in the same park, was the first in Portugal designed to be a museum, but sources date it differently. Museus e Monumentos de Portugal, the state agency that runs it, dates its first architectural project to 1940 and names the architects as Paulino Montês and Eugénio Correia. A 2018 report written at the museum says Paulino Montês showed a preliminary design and the first stone was laid on the opening day in 1934, and that the building opened on 11 August 1940. The 2022 government statement puts it at 1933, the year the museum was founded. It was classified as a building of public interest in 2002.3 sources3 sources

Malhoa's village feasts, taverns and fado singer are still part of how Portugal pictures its own past, and more than 90 years after his death the state is still buying his work.3 sources3 sources

In 2025 it paid €400,000 for the 1912 version of Os Bêbados, the most important of 16 works bought that year for national museums for a total of nearly €650,000. The picture went to the Museu do Abade de Baçal in Bragança, which has a group of naturalist paintings. The art historian Nuno Saldanha had described the series as a study of the consequences of vice and excess.1 source1 source

In Caldas da Rainha the museum reopened on 20 December 2023 after a closure for extensive building works. The €410,000 job, handed to the builders in October 2022 and paid for from the national Recovery and Resilience Plan, was meant to fix a leaking roof and drains that threatened the collection and to digitise 1,546 objects. Besides Malhoa, its collection includes works by Columbano, Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.2 sources2 sources