VIEIRA's PAINTINGS: MALHOA, a Portuguese Painter

José Malhoa, Fado, 1910, Oil, 150 cm x 183 cm

Museu do Fado, Lisboa

José Vital Branco Malhoa, was a well-known painter, who was born in Caldas da Rainha in 1855, and passed away in 1933, in Figueiró dos Vinhos.

He came to Lisbon to learn the trade of wood carver, but as fate would have it, he changed to the art of painting. He attended the Lisbon Fine Arts Academy.

He was a Co-founder of the Group of the Lion - Grupo do Leão.

The “Grupo do Leão” came to the fore at a time that permitted it to oversee a significant turning point in the Portuguese art scene. A generation of painters of great talent, creativity and in the flush of youth emerged. The old painters of the Romantic era disappeared alongside a treasured aesthetic that had shown itself spent and ill-adapted to a new modern era, while Portuguese students trained in Paris and Barbizon brought back new pictorial styles when they returned.

The Naturalism they introduced translated into a movement based on positivist theory that stressed direct experience as its guiding principle and the imitation of nature and daily life as its art.

Pictorial Naturalism took this philosophy as its own, through the experience of painting in the open air, capturing the motifs in nature and then transposing them onto the medium. The understanding of the visible was reformulated, in an attitude that aspired to possess the truth through the coherent study of colour and form.

Light lay at the heart of this style; it defined and motivated the “Grupo do Leão’s” research and its comprehension of the atmosphere and the sun, the contrasts in light and dark, the nuances, hues and transparencies.

Grupo do Leão

The José Malhoa Museum - Museu José Malhoa - painting collection represents an incomparable assembly of works of Portuguese Naturalism. José Malhoa, as patron of the Museum, is represented with the largest nucleus of work ever assembled and here naturally occupies a central position in the organisation of the collection.