Washerwomen

This work, which is perhaps unfinished, belongs to a series with the same theme, of which the painter was particularly fond, as were others from the same naturalist school, both in Portugal and abroad. It is easy to understand the reason: the artist walked around looking for places to paint landscapes and the presence of women engaged in the ancient labour of washing their clothes in the river exerted a captivating poetic and erotic force, acting as a mark of the humanisation of the landscape and its productive use – without causing any disturbance, but instead generating an organic sense of conviviality.
Silva Porto’s unmistakable style is manifested in the recreation of the vegetation in loose and imprecise patches, dotted here and there with blackish brown lines, which are sometimes branches of trees, sometimes stones and watercourses, or the suggestion of scrub vegetation. This economy of procedures, rapid and gesticulating, guarantees the unity of the composition and proclaims that, for the painting, things have a tendency to become equivalent to one another: they are brightly-coloured patches, permeated by the diffuse light that spreads with an expressive fluidity from the overcast sky. The roughly sketched figure of the washerwoman is a white shape, crossed by lines of a brown and deep red colour. We confuse the woman’s body and the object of her work, in a bold pictorial fusion that shows how Silva Porto was not at all ignorant of the more modern paths being followed by painting in his time and which displayed a particular fondness for incompleteness, turning it into an artistic stratagem. Thus, incomplete works such as this are to be counted among the artist’s most beautiful works and are indispensable for understanding his artistic value and importance, when compared with the finished works that were often directed more towards the tastes of the buying public. rather than deriving from the feelings of their creator.
Raquel Henriques da Silva