Virginia da Rosalina

A remarkable portrait of an unidentified character from the circle of the painter’s friends and acquaintances, which demonstrates the use of a highly artistic and poetic pictorial device, attempting to make the girl’s angelical beauty coincide with the surrounding nature.
António Carneiro chooses full daylight as the agent with which he will achieve this intention, resolving the forms into shaded coloured patches, with brushstrokes that are sometimes circular, other times elongated, and using a greyish-blue colour to contaminate all the other colours, which are pink, green and pale ochre. There is an evident desire to reach beyond the naturalist system, through a personally learned knowledge of the impressionist technique of painting. But if what Carneiro captures is the moment of light, in which the portrait and nature coincide as a metaphor of beauty, his intention is more enduring, proposing an expectant time that is indicated by the girl’s suspended expression, as if suggesting that the age of purity is an inner state, and not an accident of the cycle of life.
Raquel Henriques da Silva