Aurélia de Souza

Biography

She painted herself in a red coat in 1900, in Paris, and the picture has remained the best-known work of Portuguese painting around the turn of the century. It is now in the Soares dos Reis National Museum in Porto.

Maria Aurélia Martins de Sousa was born on 13 June 1866 in Valparaíso, Chile, the fourth of seven children. Her parents, António Martins de Sousa and Olinda Peres, had left Porto for Brazil and then Chile. In 1869, when the girl was three, the family returned to Porto and settled at the Quinta da China on the bank of the Douro, an estate bought with the savings brought back from South America. Her father died in 1874, and in 1880 her mother remarried. Her younger sister Sofia Martins de Sousa also became a painter.

Aurélia began drawing and painting in oils at about sixteen, with a local painter, Caetano Moreira da Costa Lima. Her first self-portrait dates from the same time; its exact date has not been established. In 1893 she and her sister entered the Porto Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied under João Marques de Oliveira, who strongly influenced her manner. She studied historical drawing, completed the first and second years of historical painting in a single year, and finished the third with a mark of 16 out of 20. The fourth year was left unfinished: she was over twenty-five, and no scholarship was available to her. From 1893 to 1896 she took part in the academy’s student exhibitions and in the fine-art exhibitions of the Ateneu Comercial do Porto. Her older sisters then came to her aid. With money from Helena Sousa Dias and Maria Estela Sousa Sampaio, in 1898 or 1899 (sources differ), Aurélia went to Paris and studied at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant. Her first exhibitions outside Portugal took place in Paris; she sold some of her work, travelled to Brittany and sent studies to Marques de Oliveira so that he could judge her progress. In 1900 Sofia joined her.

The sisters then travelled through Europe: Brussels, Antwerp, Berlin, Rome, Florence, Venice, Madrid, Seville. The museums deepened Aurélia’s interest in Flemish painting. In 1901 she returned to Porto.

At home she worked as an illustrator. Drawings for the journal Portugália: Materiais para o Estudo do Povo Português, edited by Ricardo Severo, and for Manuel Duarte de Almeida’s “Elegia Pantheista a uma Mosca” survive among her commissions. She exhibited regularly at the Porto Society of Fine Arts (1909–1911), at the Galeria da Misericórdia, at the Crystal Palace, and every year at the National Society of Fine Arts in Lisbon (1916–1921). She gave private lessons in her studio, tried painting on azulejo tiles and took up photography: self-portraits and staged photographs served her as studies of pose and light. For the painting “Saint Anthony” (1902) she photographed herself dressed as the saint on whose feast day she was born. In 1907 António Teixeira Lopes invited her to preside over the Porto Society of Fine Arts, and she declined. She later left the society: by one account in protest at rising membership fees, by another because, unlike new members, she was not given an exhibition room.

Her painting is described as a personal naturalism with touches of realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. She painted portraits and self-portraits, interiors, still lifes, flowers, scenes of everyday life and landscapes; she repeated views of the Douro at different times of day and year, trying to catch the light. She spent her last years at the Quinta da China, where she had a studio and a photographic darkroom, and painted mostly intimate interiors with female figures, busy with household tasks or lost in quiet thought.

Aurélia de Souza died on 26 May 1922 in Porto, aged fifty-five. She never married and had no children; she left almost all her property to her nieces. She is buried in the Prado do Repouso cemetery in the family tomb. The first posthumous exhibition, of 266 works, mostly from private collections, was held in 1936 in the former Crystal Palace. Most of her paintings are now in the Soares dos Reis National Museum, in the Marta Ortigão Sampaio House-Museum in Porto and in the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Chiado) in Lisbon.