The Problem of Race in Brazilian Painting, c. 1850-1920

It has become something of a truism that Brazilian art of the nineteenth century was unable or unwilling to engage with the representation of Afro-Brazilian people. Though largely unwritten, the longstanding assumption has been that black subjects were only represented, if at all, through circumstantial, objectifying or exclusionary perspectives. In recent years, however, new scholarship has demonstrated that the representation and non-representation of black subjects is much more complex and nuanced than previously assumed. The present essay aims to contribute to this ongoing task by showing that the purported silence of nineteenth-century art concerning black subjects is a historiographical misconception. In documenting just some of the artworks that revise our understanding of how race was represented in nineteenth-century Brazil, this essay observes that the supposedly conservative medium of painting actually preceded literature and the social sciences by at least two decades in raising awareness of race as a topic of cultural significance.