Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, the painter of Portugal’s thinkers, born 1857

Some time after the Paris Salon of 1882, a painting three metres wide was shipped from Le Havre to Lisbon. It showed five people making music in a dim drawing room: a young woman in a satin skirt, two men singing, a second woman reading from a score and a man at the piano, beside a candle whose flame is hidden from view. Its painter, Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, was in his mid-twenties.1 source1 source

He had shown it at the Salon as Soirée chez lui, and hardly anyone noticed. He was now sending it home as a thank-you to the Countess of Edla, the second wife of King Fernando II, who had paid for his studies in Paris. He insured it for 60,000 francs, and Portuguese customs claimed a share of that figure. The crate sat in customs for a year before the valuation came down to 225 francs.2 sources2 sources

When it was finally entered for the 1884 exhibition of Lisbon’s Sociedade Promotora de Belas-Artes, under the title Concerto de amadores, the jury refused it. It hung in the back room with the other rejected works, though in a prominent place. One critic, Monteiro Ramalho, complained of patches of terrible, opaque blackness. Another, Jaime Batalha Reis, called it the only powerful and original work of art that painting had produced in Portugal.1 source1 source

The pattern held for much of his life. Critics found his work unfinished or too dark, and the public took years to catch up. By 1900 the critics agreed on him, and after 1910 the Republic commissioned its official portraits from him. The museum he later ran calls him Portugal’s greatest painter of the nineteenth century.2 sources2 sources

Columbano Augusto Prostes Bordalo Pinheiro was born in Cacilhas, the riverside village in Almada facing Lisbon, on 21 November 1857. His father, Manuel Maria Bordalo Pinheiro (1815 to 1880), was a painter of small scenes of daily life in the Dutch seventeenth-century manner. His elder brother Rafael, born in Lisbon on 21 March 1846, became the country’s best-known caricaturist. His sister Maria Augusta posed for two of the pictures he later painted in Paris.5 sources5 sources

Most of his training happened at home. His father gave him lessons at family gatherings in the evenings. He enrolled at Lisbon’s Academy of Fine Arts, where his teachers included the portraitist Miguel Ângelo Lupi and the sculptor José Simões de Almeida. He finished the painting course in 1876 with low marks, the museum notes, for poor attendance and lack of application.3 sources3 sources

He first exhibited in 1874, with anecdotal scenes of popular life, and was rewarded from that year on. By 1880 his genre scenes had turned to the small comedies of Lisbon’s lower middle class, painted with a gentle irony. He applied for a state scholarship to study in Paris in 1879, for landscape, and again in 1880, for history painting. The jury turned him down both times.2 sources2 sources

Turned down by the state, Columbano used his connections. King Fernando II, through the Countess of Edla, offered him a grant generous enough to pay for his sister to go with him. He left for Paris in 1881 and stayed until 1883. The French portraitist Carolus-Duran, who had admired his work in Lisbon, was to take him into his studio, but that never happened.3 sources3 sources

Paris did not charm him. He made little effort to meet young artists and complained that the city smelled of rice powder and oil. He did gain a friend in the American painter John Singer Sargent, who tried and failed to get him into the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris. The Louvre became his main interest. The ten or so paintings he made there have darker backgrounds and a narrower range of ochres.1 source1 source

The museum counts Concerto de amadores the finest of them, and its size was deliberate. According to the sculptor and art historian Diogo de Macedo, who later ran the same museum as Columbano, he wanted the picture to be seen among the hundreds hanging at the Salon. The subject was intimate: his own sister in the satin skirt, Adolfo and Josefa Greno, an Italian singer, and the painter Artur Loureiro at the keyboard. Only the critic Louis Fourcaud, a friend of Sargent, wrote about it.3 sources3 sources

While he was away, a group of young Lisbon painters had found a home. They met at the Leão de Ouro, a brewery and beer cellar on what was then Rua do Príncipe, now Rua 1.º de Dezembro, and took its name. Their leader was Silva Porto, who had introduced open-air landscape painting to Portugal in 1880. From 1881 they held annual exhibitions they called Modern Painting.3 sources3 sources

Columbano painted people rather than landscapes, but he joined them and exhibited with the group between 1882 and 1887. When the brewery was refitted with a new restaurant, each artist contributed a work to the decoration. Columbano was given the group portrait for the entrance.3 sources3 sources

The finished canvas of 1885 is nearly four metres wide. Fourteen men sit and stand along a white table between two pale columns. Silva Porto is at the centre, the place of the head of a school. Some came to Columbano’s studio to pose for it; others he took from earlier portraits, sketches and photographs. Pedro Lapa, who wrote the museum’s catalogue entry, thinks this mix explains why the figures sit a little apart, as if pasted in. The story goes that he added the brewery’s owner to bring the number to 14 and avoid the 13 of the Last Supper.2 sources2 sources

The painting hung at the brewery until 1945. In 1953 the state bought it from its owner, Ramos da Costa, for 400,000 escudos from a special Finance Ministry grant, after it had nearly been sold to the Brazilian collector Assis Chateaubriand or to Artur Cupertino de Miranda. The Centro Nacional de Cultura gives 1945 as the year the museum acquired it.2 sources2 sources

At the end of the 1880s his painting changed again. In 1889 he saw Velázquez and the Spanish masters of shadow at the Prado in Madrid for the first time, and in Paris the Symbolists were in fashion. The first result was a portrait of the poet and philosopher Antero de Quental, whom the museum calls the symbol of a generation.3 sources3 sources

The background is completely dark. The paint is thin, the outline of the shoulders melts into shadow, and a pale light from above picks out the forehead, the cheekbones and the sunken eyes, so that the skull seems to show through the skin. Two years later Antero killed himself, and most readings of the portrait have treated it as a premonition. Columbano did not see it that way.1 source1 source

In the 1890s he invited a whole intellectual generation to sit for him, and he kept at it for three decades. His sitters included Eça de Queirós, Ramalho Ortigão, Oliveira Martins, Fialho de Almeida, Bulhão Pato and Jaime Batalha Reis, and later Teixeira de Pascoais and Raul Brandão.4 sources4 sources

The early portraits caught Portugal in a bad decade. In the British Ultimatum of 1890 Britain forced Portugal to pull its troops out of lands in central Africa that it claimed, and a deep economic and political crisis followed. The curators read the portraits as a record of a pessimistic age, each sitter standing for a body of work outside the frame.2 sources2 sources

Recognition came at last. By the end of the century the critics agreed on him, and in 1901 he became professor of history painting at the Lisbon school of fine arts, where he had been a poor student. He taught there until 1924, leaving because he could not accept the modernist taste of the younger artists, and was twice president of the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes, in 1902 and 1914.4 sources4 sources

Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro was 11 years older. His weekly O António Maria, a humorous paper on politics that ran from 1879 to 1885 and again from 1891 to 1898, counted Columbano among its contributors, alongside Ramalho Ortigão, the painters António Ramalho and Ribeiro Cristino, and Rafael’s son Manuel Gustavo.2 sources2 sources

The brothers moved in the same circle, and Columbano painted his family again and again. In 1884 he painted his nephew Manuel Gustavo, a small panel with a red sock and clasped hands that the museum calls an extreme moment in his modernity. In O Grupo do Leão he put Rafael directly below himself.2 sources2 sources

In the full-length portrait of 1891 the caricaturist sits forward on a sofa with his cane, his top hat and gloves thrown down beside him and a pile of papers at his elbow. It stayed in the family until Manuel Gustavo bequeathed it to the museum founded in Rafael’s name. Rafael died in 1905, and Columbano outlived him by 24 years.2 sources2 sources

On 5 October 1910 a revolution in Lisbon ended the monarchy. The new rulers wanted new symbols, and on 15 October the Provisional Government named a commission to design a national flag to replace the blue and white of the Braganza kings. Columbano was its painter. The other members were the writer Abel Botelho, the journalist and politician João Chagas, and two officers who had fought in the revolution, Lieutenant Ladislau Pereira and Captain Afonso Palla.2 sources2 sources

The commission’s report of 29 October rejected blue because it was tied to the cult of Our Lady of the Conception. Green was the colour of hope and, for the positivist philosopher Auguste Comte, whose ideas shaped Portuguese republicanism, of progress. Above all it had been flown in the revolution. Red was described as combative, warm and virile. White stayed for the sake of tradition, and the armillary sphere of the Age of Discovery and the old shield of castles and quinas kept a link with the past.1 source1 source

The government approved the final design on 29 November, after some changes, and made 1 December a Flag Day. That did not settle the matter. For months the newspapers carried a “quarrel of the flag”, with rival designs mixing the old and new colours. Teófilo Braga, head of the Provisional Government, was the chief defender of green and red. The poet Guerra Junqueiro, the historian Braamcamp Freire and the philosopher Sampaio Bruno wanted to keep blue and white.3 sources3 sources

The government refused the plebiscite that the blue-and-white camp demanded, and the Constituent Assembly confirmed the flag at its first session on 19 June 1911. The decree appeared in the official gazette, the Diário do Governo, the next day.2 sources2 sources

A decree of 26 May 1911 split the old national fine arts museum in two. Works made before 1850 stayed at the Janelas Verdes palace in what became the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. Later works went to a new Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea in the former Convent of São Francisco in the Chiado, next door to the school of fine arts. Its first director was the painter Carlos Reis.1 source1 source

Columbano was appointed in his place on 14 August 1914, and the ministry confirmed the appointment on 17 December. He redesigned the galleries with the architect José Luís Monteiro, down to the benches, had the main works photographed for a catalogue, and reopened the museum on 4 April 1916. A paper praised him in 1923 for turning three filthy friars’ cells, a choked staircase and a revolting courtyard into a museum.1 source1 source

His taste was conservative. Under him the museum bought mainly Romantic and naturalist painting, though more modern sculpture got in. The modernists who met at the café A Brasileira in the Chiado complained, and he ignored them. He judged only one younger painter, Adriano de Sousa Lopes, fit to succeed him.2 sources2 sources

He was also the Republic’s painter of record. In 1910 he sat on a commission listing the contents of the royal palaces, and in 1914 he painted Manuel de Arriaga, the first elected president, in the Lions’ Chair at Belém. Teófilo Braga’s portrait was commissioned in 1917, two years after his few months as president, and shows him among his books. Manuel Teixeira Gomes, a friend since Columbano had painted him as ambassador in London in 1911, was painted in office in 1925.5 sources5 sources

In July 1927 the board of the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes attacked his running of the museum, and the state’s art council defended him. Sources differ on when he left: the museum’s 2010 exhibition text says he was director until 1927, while its 2007 exhibition text, its history page and Margarida Elias, who wrote her doctoral thesis on him, give 1929. Elias found that a decree of 2 March 1929 setting an age limit removed him, at 71.4 sources4 sources

On 21 March 1929 the council paid him tribute. It was announced that he would be made honorary director, and a decree published on 30 April gave him a pension for life. The writer Raul Brandão, whose portrait he had painted, wrote in his memoirs that the loss of the museum killed him.2 sources2 sources

Columbano died in Lisbon on 6 November 1929, two weeks before his 72nd birthday. One of his last works was an unfinished self-portrait in a hat and monocle. He had meant to add his wife, Emília, in the empty pale space on the right. She left it to the museum in 1945.3 sources3 sources

His portraits of Antero de Quental, Eça de Queirós, Ramalho Ortigão and Teófilo Braga are still his best-known works. The museum he ran still holds about 200 of his works, and under his successor it took over his studio next door and opened a room in his name.4 sources4 sources

His work also travelled. The Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Palazzo Pitti in Florence and the national fine arts museum in Rio de Janeiro own his paintings, and lent them to Lisbon for the museum’s 2010 exhibition, part of the centenary of the Republic. The flag he helped choose has flown over Portugal, unchanged in its colours, since December 1910.4 sources4 sources