Castro Maya Collection

The fashion for collecting associated with the 19th century inspired the accumulation of the first items in the Castro Maya collection. Objects of the decorative arts, mainly oriental, acquired in France or in trips to the East predominated in this period.

The piece originally belonged to a Baroque church in Minas Gerais and was acquired by Castro Maya in Congonhas in the first half of the 20th century.

Castro Maya's collection of Braziliana was considered the most important private collection in Brazil in the 1950s, a highlight being more than 500 original works by Jean-Baptiste Debret.

During the 19th century, it was foreign artists who recorded images of Brazil. Romantic Europe harbored a great interest in distant territories laden with exoticism and eagerly sought knowledge of environments and societies so different from their own.

Two oil paintings by Nicolas Antoine Taunay, one of the main painters participating in the French Artistic Mission which arrived in Brazil in 1816, were acquired by Castro Maya's father in Parisian auctions in 1892. Later, Castro Maya doubled this number with the purchase of paintings belonging to Djalma da Fonseca Hermes. In 1953, the works were shown in the II Biennial of São Paulo in a room dedicated to the Brazilian Landscape until 1900, to which the Castro Maya collection contributed 11 works.

The work was acquired by Castro Maya in 1923 at an exhibition of French art in Rio de Janeiro and marks the beginning of his activity as an art collector. At this moment, in his first acquisition, Castro Maya shows an affinity with the selection parameters that guided the formation of his father's collection. He tended towards the paintings of contemporary artists, displayed in the rooms and with a predominantly realistic theme, albeit slightly idealized, but which ensured a pattern of narrative and readability without incurring the aesthetic rupture articulated by Impressionism.

In the 1940s, the painting belonged to the Marques Rebello collection and as such featured in the exhibition Contemporary European Painting organized by Castro Maya to inaugurate the activities of the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, of which he was founder and president until 1952. In 1961, Castro Maya had the opportunity to add it to his collection through a purchase made at the Barcinsky art gallery in Rio de Janeiro. Participating in the early stages of Cubism, Metzinger wrote the Du Cubisme treatise in 1912, in collaboration with Albert Gleizes, which proposed a theoretical basis for the movement.

Visconti was traditionally "read" at the time as a national impressionist and therefore a direct predecessor of modernism.

Castro Maya was a patron and friend of Brazilian artists of his time, especially Candido Portinari, with whom he developed many projects from the 1940s until the artist's death. This relationship of twenty years resulted in the accumulation of 168 original works, including paintings, drawings, engravings, and illustrations of books, making this one of the greatest public collections of the painter's work.

From 1950, pieces from northeastern ceramists and paintings by popular and emerging artists become part of the Castro Maya collection, the first acquisition being a batch of Vitalino figures. Castro Maya marked his participation in the process of recognition and acclaim that popular or regional art would receive from the intellectual elites.