Estimate

25.000 - 40.000

Session 2

25 June 2020

Hammer Price

Description

Oil on canvas
Signed and dated 1895

73x92 cm

Category

Paintings

Additional Information

Veloso Salgado's artistic work is of great relevance amongst his contemporaries for the embracing of symbolism, as well as for the extraordinary quality of his landscapes, the superb paintings of his youth in Italy and Britany, the historical paintings and large size mural decorative work (as seen at the Portuguese Parliament building or at Lisbon's Central Synagogue) and the vast portraiture production, from which stands out the Equestrian portrait of Queen D. Amelia and of King D.Carlos and those of members of the Medeiros e Almeida family which are today exhibited at their Foundation Museum.
Between 1901 and 1940 Salgado taught painting at Lisbon’s “Academia de Belas Artes", where, for some years, he worked side by side with the renowned Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro (1857-1929).
Through his work it is possible to find various situations that could be defined as Symbolism. In “An orphan” of Breton flavour, and even towards the end of his career in a 1932 commission for the Military Museum in Lisbon, where, in a somewhat unusual Pre-Raphaelite tone, the Unknown Soldier is glorified by the Fatherland.
Within this symbolic language, his most successful works are however the late 19th century landscapes depleted of rhetoric, such as “Ao poente”- At sunset (1892) and particularly the work we are presenting for sale, “Visão” – A vision (1895).
Widely accepted by Historians and Art Critics as a Portuguese masterpiece from the late 19th century, one of the few that escaped the naturalistic conventions of the period and, simultaneously, in chronological terms, seen as one of the two first works of dreamlike and symbolist character by a Portuguese painter, this work was gifted by Veloso Salgado in 1940 to António de Medeiros e Almeida’s brother, the Medical Doctor Gustavo de Medeiros e Almeida, remaining in the family up to the present.
The intentional deformation of the trees, whose trunks were transformed in curved and two-dimensional arabesques of sinuous graphic quality, opening into tree tops suggesting almost plain cartouches of “synthetic” taste, in an obvious appropriation of Japanese prints traits, corroborates the influence of a group of young, post-impressionist vanguard artists from the last decade of the 19th century, known as “Les Nabis”.
Towards the end of the 1890’s the young Salgado had “a foot in Paris and another in Lisbon”, as noted in the “Diário Ilustrado” newspaper in 1897, and it was certainly at that time that he viewed that group’s works (whose last group exhibition was in 1899).
Admired by the most qualified visitors to the 1999 Veloso Salgado retrospective exhibition, at Museu do Chiado and at Lisbon’s Medical School, amongst others the art critic José Luís Porfírio and Professor Raquel Henriques da Silva, at the time Director of the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga and of the Portuguese Institute of Museums respectively, this work was referred to, by Professor Henriques da Silva in the magazine “Arte Ibérica” as probably the best in that exhibition.


Exhibitions:
- Grémio Artístico de Lisboa, 1896
- “José Simões de Almeida e José Veloso Salgado”, Academia Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisboa, 1939
- “Veloso Salgado, 1864-1945”, large two venue retrospective exhibition: Chiado Museum and Lisbon Medical School, 1999.

Literature:
Rui Afonso Santos – Veloso Salgado: 1864-1945, IMC, 1999, pág. 28-29.