Lagoa Henriques, the sculptor who sat Pessoa down in the Chiado

On the pavement outside A Brasileira, at the top of Rua Garrett, a thin man in a hat and bow tie sits with his legs crossed at a small round table. He is made of bronze, and so are his chair, the table and a second, empty chair across from him. There is no pedestal. Visitors sit in the empty chair to have their picture taken with Fernando Pessoa.3 sources3 sources

The man who made him, the sculptor Lagoa Henriques, died in Lisbon on 21 February 2009, aged 85, after a long illness. Tributes lead with the Pessoa. In 2024 the Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis in Porto, which owns one of his early bronzes, introduced him as the author of “the iconic statue of Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon’s Chiado district”.2 sources2 sources

That one statue hides a long working life. Lagoa Henriques spent more than 25 years teaching drawing at the fine arts schools of Porto and Lisbon, made monuments to poets from Constância to Loulé, presented arts programmes on television and filled a studio on the Avenida da Índia, in Belém, with shells, masks, tree trunks and books.3 sources3 sources

Fernando Pessoa was born on 13 June 1888 on the fourth floor of a building in the Largo de São Carlos, a short walk from where the statue now sits. He died at the Hospital de São Luís dos Franceses on 30 November 1935. In between he earned his living drafting letters in English and French for Portuguese firms, and wrote poetry under his own name and under invented poets with their own biographies and styles, which he called heteronyms.3 sources3 sources

Most of that work was unknown when he died, and his reputation grew afterwards. In 1979 the state bought his papers, and in 1985 his remains were moved to the Jerónimos Monastery. The story of his death and posthumous fame is told in our article on 30 November 1935.3 sources3 sources

A Brasileira opened in 1905 in a former shirt maker’s shop at Rua Garrett 120. Its founder, Adriano Telles, had made his money in the coffee trade in Brazil and set out to teach the Portuguese to drink coffee; after a remodelling in 1908 the café sold it by the cup, and for a time gave it away. By the 1920s it was a meeting place for writers and artists, and in 1925 its walls were hung with paintings by modernists including Almada Negreiros and Eduardo Viana.1 source1 source

Pessoa was one of the regulars. His biographer Richard Zenith dates his café habit to his two years on the arts course at the Curso Superior de Letras, which he began in 1905. He went to more than one café every day: A Brasileira in the Chiado, its sister branch on the Rossio and the Martinho da Arcada on the Praça do Comércio. From 1920, Zenith says, it was always the Martinho da Arcada.2 sources2 sources

António Augusto Lagoa Henriques was born in Lisbon on 27 December 1923, the son of Delfim Augusto Henriques and Palmira C. de Almeida Lagoa Henriques. The family lived first in the Bairro dos Açores, in Rua da Ilha Terceira, and moved after his grandmother’s death to his grandfather’s second-floor flat at Rua dos Douradores 21, in the Baixa. He spent his holidays in Nazaré until he was about 20.1 source1 source

The philosopher and teacher Agostinho da Silva, who gave him private lessons, advised him to take up art. In 1945 he enrolled in the special sculpture course at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, and he first exhibited in 1946. Three years after enrolling he asked to transfer to Porto to study under the sculptor Barata Feyo, and there he was also taught by the architect Carlos Ramos and the painter Dórdio Gomes.3 sources3 sources

He finished the higher course in sculpture at the Porto school in 1954, and his final work was given 20 out of 20, the top of the Portuguese scale. Before that he had already won Soares dos Reis sculpture prizes in 1950, 1952 and 1953, and in 1953 he made his international debut at the second São Paulo Biennial in Brazil.2 sources2 sources

The Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis in Porto has his Cabeça de Rapariga (Head of a Girl) of 1953 on show: a young woman’s head in bronze on a granite cylinder, the hair cut at chin height under a small beret. His work is also in the Chiado Museum and the Gulbenkian in Lisbon and the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo. In 1958 he won a medal of honour at the Brussels World’s Fair.2 sources2 sources

He began teaching at the Porto school in 1959 and taught drawing there until 1966. Under the 1957 reform he gave his students exercises in drawing tree bark, fruit skins, the grain of sawn wood, cloth and stones, to explore texture, form, space and light.2 sources2 sources

In 1966 he moved, at his own request, to the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, and taught there until the late 1980s. He took the drawing class out of the building and into the street, using everyday life as the model. In 1974, when the school’s courses were restructured, he created a new subject, Visual Communication, which joined gesture and word, writing and drawing. From 6 June 1981 he chaired the school’s scientific and teaching council.2 sources2 sources

Sources differ slightly on the dates: a 2024 study based on his papers gives 1959 to 1966 in Porto and 1966 to 1988 in Lisbon, while Lisbon City Council’s toponymy office gives 1960 to 1965 and 1966 to 1987. In the 1990s he taught drawing at the Lisbon School of Conservation and Restoration, in 2000 he became a guest professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, and in 2008 an emeritus professor at the Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa.3 sources3 sources

Heritage became a second career. In 1982 the Portuguese Institute of Cultural Heritage brought him in to coordinate a project to make the country’s heritage better known. The toponymy office says the work ran until 1984, the Serigrafia biography that it ended in 1983. In 1984 he sat on the jury of a competition for a medal in honour of the modernist Almada Negreiros.2 sources2 sources

He also taught on television. His programmes, some of which survive in the archives of RTP, then the country’s only broadcaster, included Desenho: Risco Inadiável, Pare, Escute e Olhe, Lisboa Revisitada and, in 1985, Portugal Passado Presente. In it he travelled the country looking at folk architecture, crafts, customs and farm work alongside fine art.3 sources3 sources

An episode of the second series on the Alto Alentejo dwelt on the clay figures of Estremoz, Arraiolos rugs and the pottery of Redondo. “It is interesting how birds appear as a motif, as inspiration for a whole series of works of craft and even of fine art,” he told viewers (translated from Portuguese). Mateus also quotes him on what the programme was for.1 source1 source

Much of his public work honours writers. Joana Souto Mateus, a librarian at the Lisbon Faculty of Fine Arts who studies his bequest, notes that most of his many public sculptures depict poets. Before the Pessoa there was a Camões in Constância, on the Tagus, in 1981; after it came the folk poet António Aleixo in Loulé in 1989 and the novelist Alves Redol in Vila Franca de Xira in 2004.2 sources2 sources

In 1985, the fiftieth anniversary of Pessoa’s death, the poet’s remains were moved to the cloister of the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém, and Lagoa Henriques made the tomb. Three years later he came back to Pessoa for the Chiado.2 sources2 sources

The Aleixo shows how he worked. His copy of the folk poet’s Inéditos carries a dedication from Aleixo’s son dated 1984, when work on the Loulé monument began. Tucked inside are photocopies of Aleixo’s poem “A arte”, with Lagoa Henriques’s notes on the back about olive presses and oil-making in Loulé.1 source1 source

There was decorative work too: sculptural motifs for the Rex, Ritz and Altis hotels in Lisbon, bas-reliefs for the law courts of Lisbon and Gouveia, and statues of the Empress Sissi and Pope John Paul II in Madeira. In Macau he made Year of the Dog and a piece called Encounter between West and East, near the ruins of São Paulo.2 sources2 sources

The Pessoa was made in the 1980s and put in place outside A Brasileira in 1988, a hundred years after the poet’s birth. A 2022 graduation project at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague says the city council commissioned it; the council sources consulted for this article do not say. None of them gives the day of the unveiling either. The Centro Nacional de Cultura’s guide to the Chiado calls it a stop nobody should miss.4 sources4 sources

Lagoa Henriques gave Pessoa no plinth. He put him at street level, at a table, with an empty chair that a visitor can take. A student at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, writing in 2022, called the result a statue with “one where the poet sits and one for you, the viewer turned participant”.2 sources2 sources

The council’s Lojas com História programme, which lists the city’s historic shops, says Lagoa Henriques “probably had no idea” his bronze would become the most photographed in the country. Visit Lisboa, the city’s tourism body, calls it one of the most photographed spots in Lisbon. Neither gives a figure.2 sources2 sources

1988 was also the year of the Chiado fire. On 25 August a fire that broke out in the Grandella department store destroyed 18 buildings in Rua Garrett, Rua do Carmo and Rua Nova do Almada, killed a firefighter and a resident and injured at least 50 people. A Brasileira, higher up Rua Garrett, is still open.2 sources2 sources

Lagoa Henriques died in Lisbon on 21 February 2009, aged 85, after a long illness. In his will he left everything to the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, the successor of the school where he had taught: his sculpture and drawings, his collections, his papers and his library. In April 2009, the faculty named its auditorium after him.3 sources3 sources

His last studio was his second. The first was in the riverside pavilions at Belém left over from the Exposição do Mundo Português, the regime’s great exhibition of 1940. After a fire there in the early 1970s the city council gave the sculptors who had lost their studios new spaces, and Lagoa Henriques got warehouses on the Avenida da Índia. The building now houses the CAL, the Lisbon Archaeology Centre.2 sources2 sources

He collected as widely as he taught: shells, nautilus and whelk, folk pottery, African and Japanese masks, Chinese and Japanese fans, musical instruments, old wooden statues, paintings and tree trunks. His library alone ran to more than 3,000 publications, many still being catalogued in 2024. In 2019 the faculty’s gallery showed part of the collection in an exhibition that evoked his studio.2 sources2 sources

The state honoured him in his lifetime. The presidency’s register of honours lists him as a Grand Cross of the Order of Merit from 4 February 1989; the toponymy office dates the award to 1988.2 sources2 sources

The street name came in 2015. By a municipal notice of 24 July that year, Lisbon named Rua Lagoa Henriques, the street beside his old studio on the Avenida da Índia, in Belém. The proposal came from Maria Calado, a member of the city’s toponymy commission. Nazaré, where he spent his childhood holidays, also has a street in his name.1 source1 source

The Soares dos Reis museum calls him a master and motivator of successive generations of artists. In Lisbon he sent his drawing students into the streets, and the subject he created in 1974 put words and images in the same class.2 sources2 sources

His poets are approachable. Camões in Constância, Pessoa in the Chiado and Aleixo in Loulé all sit, close to the ground. The Aleixo was unveiled in Loulé in 1989, and in 1996 a replica was set up outside the Café Calcinha, where the folk poet wrote many of his verses.3 sources3 sources