Biografia do traço

Drawing—the closer approach to the idea—is a central pedagogical axis for hand and vision training. Despite its importance, its structured teaching took a long time to arrive in Portugal, and, unlike in several other European countries, it was born in the heart of a museum.

It was in Oporto, that João Baptista Ribeiro (1790-1868), a royal painter, a great lover of drawing, and aware of its pedagogical value, convinced the future king D. Pedro IV to create a museum of paintings and prints in Invicta. Shortly after that, he was entrusted with organizing this institution (Porto Museum, embryo of what became the Soares dos Reis National Museum) to which Baptista Ribeiro was committed, and whose regulation established the pedagogical principles by which the institution should be guided. It will be in this informal school that the victorious liberals will be inspired. The creation of the Academies of Fine Arts of Lisbon and Porto finally arrived in 1836, marking the coordinates of artistic creation based on the knowledge and practice of drawing.

The MNAC collection hosts many works from this national academic tradition, which formed other artistic disciplines. After more than a century stored in the museum's reserves, these works were studied and prepared to be exhibited in 2020. The pandemic, however, forced its closure just over a month after its opening.

As we prepare to reopen the collection's long-term exhibition to the public, we could not fail to share once again these seminal works by many of the names in our art history, to which we add others, contemporaries – in a testimony to the way in which time, in art, folds and unfolds,  with their own rules that each creator claims for themselves.