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Jean Baptiste Debret: the man who painted slaves

 

In 1807 during the Peninsular War when Napoleon’s troops invaded Iberia, King João VI of Portugal fled his country taking his entire court of almost 15,000 to live in Brazil. A few months later, seventeen fishermen from the small fishing town of Olhão in the Algarve crossed the Atlantic to tell their King that the French had been defeated but he stayed in Brazil for another 13 years. In Rio de Janeiro he created many new titled nobles among the local Brazilians, he encouraged the development of manufacturing industry and modernised the city with a sewer system, public libraries, botanic gardens, an opera house and of course palaces. A bureaucratic civil service was established and every day life depended upon the labour of African slaves.



Meanwhile in Paris, Jean Baptiste Debret, was training at the French Academy of Fine Arts, as a pupil of the famous Jacques-Louis David. In 1816 after the defeat of Napoleon, Debret travelled to Brazil as part of the French Artistic mission to create an arts and crafts lyceum in Rio de Janeiro. Later this became the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts where Debret would teach.  Favoured by Dom João VI, Debret painted his portrait and a painting of the arrival of his new wife Maria Leopoldina of Austria prior to them becoming Emperor and Empress of Brazil. But Debret also used his Romantic style to sketch details of the lives of the slaves and the persecuted indigenous people. The pictures show us an honest view of their suffering and their day to day lives.

Indian creek

The gypsy's house






On his return to France in 1831 Debret published his lithographs in a book entitled Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Bresil but although it depicted such important images of early 19th century Brazilian life it was not successful and Jean Baptiste Debret died in Paris in 1948 in poverty.

Bird Sellers

The Coronation of Dom Pedro I

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