Portrait of Amália Rodrigues

An academic painter who studied at the Escola de Belas-Artes do Porto, Eduardo Malta was briefly a companion of the Portuguese modernists of the 1920s (collaborating anonymously in the painting that José Pacheko produced in 1925 for the decoration of “A Brasileira”, a café in Lisbon’s Chiado district). Immediately afterwards, in particular after he had painted an equestrian portrait of Primo de Rivera in 1928, he established himself as the preferred portrait artist of a worldly elite composed of aristocrats, members of the haute bourgeoisie, politicians and some artists and intellectuals. An admirer of ancient painting and the work of David and Ingres, and openly rejecting all modern and contemporary practices, beginning with Impressionism itself, Malta cultivated a conventional style of neoclassical painting that could be inserted in the so-called “Return to Order” which, in the 1930s particularly, established the guidelines for much of the officialised production of western painting, in detriment to the avant-garde experimentation that had been initiated at the beginning of the century.At the time when this portrait was painted, Amália Rodrigues was twenty-nine years old, at the height of her beauty and on the verge of recognition as the greatest ever singer of fado, already enjoying the fame that her incursions into the cinema had made possible. A woman of humble origins and a privileged interpreter of popular feelings, Amália appears here paradoxically aristocratised and devoid of any expressiveness, as was customary in Malta’s portrait painting, being given a physiognomic treatment with a neoclassical stylisation that is evident in the conventionality of her pose and the slender elongated features of her face, nose, mouth and hands, which remain undisturbed by the detail of her prominent cheekbones.