Portrait of Abel Acácio de Almeida

The memory of Manet's painting depicting Zola on a background of Japanese prints is inescapable in front of this portrait of the writer Abel Botelho, but it is not by the same pictorial attitude but by what separates them and implicitly defines the limits of the project of Antonio Ramalho. Thus, the great profusion of oriental decorative elements around the picture focuses our attention on the face of the writer. The realism with which he is portrayed, resorting to a modeling and a detailed description, oblivious to modern values, contrasts with the dilution caused by color distribution. The silk of the background radiates as if it were an aureole, an ironic aspect that comes to contaminate the overall picture. Also the small figure that sneaks out of a porcelain jar, a combination of puppet and homunculus, utters the suggestion of the characteristic mystery of the nineteenth-century vision of the East. Japonism was fashionable in the late nineteenth century, as chinoiserie had been in the eighteenth century. However, if the Japanese print influenced the planning of Manet's modern painting space, his understanding in this context reflects an overlapping of the picturesque to the pictorial, characteristic of naturalism. The book the writer holds defines a horizontal line above which objects hove, as signs of a legendary world and below which the painting almost annihilates the commitment of representation to reveal the labyrinth of a space to the conquest of its surface that only the corner of a table comes to relativize. Abel Botelho, besides diplomat, developed an intense literary activity, mainly during the decade of 90. In the year in which the painter portrays him, he took to the scene in the "Theater of the Grémio" a piece of his own: Jucunda. His literary affiliation follows the realistic school in the continuity of the Generation of 70. He was also one of the founders of the Grémio Artistico, who succeeded the "Lion Group", having published some critical texts about artists his friends in several periodicals, in the 1880s and 1890.