Portrait of Viscountess D. Carlota de Menezes

With this elegant picture of his wife, Meneses introduces the mundane and showy portrait of Portuguese Romanticism and the urban bourgeoisie of the "Regeneration" era. A portraitist of the Romantic generation, the most travelled and also the most informed about modern pictorial processes, Meneses considered himself an expert on the genre because he felt he understood its characteristics as a "true gentleman". In this female portrait, depicted in a reflexive image of power, Meneses enhances the features of the lady and her white silk dress, distinctly marked by areas of intense light and planes of dark. Chromatically, it combines with the red dots of the figure, in the hair and sash, but above all with a huge Indian shawl that subtly defines the outlines of the draped skirt. This portrait, executed in large format, more detailed than perceptible, of an upwardly aspiring bourgeois provincialism, imposes an accuracy of line that limits the influence of the German portraitist Winterhalter.