OUR JOURNAL COVER NOSSA CAPA
During 15 years that he was in Brazil, as a member of French mission charged with creating the Rio de Janeiro Imperial Academy of Fine Arts , Jean Baptiste Debret was a painter absolutely integrated to social reports and questions of Brazilian people. In the same way that he served to the court producing gravures which portrayed the quotidian ceremonial of nobles and personally to D. Pedro I, he felt himself intimately joined to citys life, with its slaves, masters, habits, customs and traditions.
In watercolors, gravures and lithographies, Debret was precious in visual description of Brazilian urban life of 19th century, revealing without modesty, but without exaggeration the reality of slavery; punishment to black people brought from Africa; the miscegenation that was just beginning; and difficulties experimented by black people, already at liberty, in cohabiting with enfranchisement and customs of simple life, but full of icons of Portuguese court and its imperial life.
In watercolor that illustrates our Cover, we have a Debrets picture dated of 1820-1830, entitled "Mask used in black people with habit of eating ground" an artifice that did not impose physical torture, but limitation to whom brought from its miserable origin the habit of facing hungry with ingestion of ground which brought to them sickness and not rarely death.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
22 Mar 2006 -
Date of issue
Dec 2005
