With a sense of tender intimacy combined with an artistic freedom, Carneiro's portraits of his children are thematic of his later work, and have an informality that makes this extensive family chronicle a jewel of modern Portuguese painting.

 

This painting shows his two eldest children from his marriage to Rosa Carneiro; the well-known composer Cláudio Carneyro (1895-1963) and Maria Josefina (1889-1925), which places the scene at around mid 1900. Free from the constraints of the solemn and controlled tone of the historical-religious subject matter he was best known for, which was the subject of commissions and public scrutiny, this portrait of his children in their domestic environment experimented with Impressionist touches, and used small brush strokes that sought nuances of light, and gave texture to the surface through shade and colour. While the volume of the paint gave materiality to this painting, the painter's marks, intense colours and the immediacy of his pictorial choreography also remit photographic portraits. This is communicated through the small scale and the framing that rejects physical proximity and cuts off parts of the body, as well as through the way Carneiro positioned his children in an implicit complicity through a virtuoso pictorial suggestion of spontaneity: from the serious pose of the older brother, to the shy posture of Maria Josefina, whose red garments against the pale shades of the background lead the eye to the symbolic and carefully worked detail of her hands holding a flower. Additionally, the recognition of the presence of the observer from under the shade of her hat reinforces the illusion of an intimate/affectionate familial space that has been almost furtively captured.

 

 

Afonso Ramos

March 2013