Jean-Baptiste Debret

Jean-Baptiste Debret (born April 18, 1768, Paris, France—died June 28, 1848, Paris) was a French painter and draughtsman known for his picturesque images of Brazil.

Debret began his artistic career in France, where Neoclassicism dominated the arts. As a teenager he accompanied his cousin, the noted Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David, on an extended trip to Italy. In 1785 Debret entered the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and he won the grand prize of Rome in 1791. By the early 19th century he was regularly painting large canvases with Napoleonic themes.

With the fall of Napoleon, Debret joined the 1816 French Artistic Mission to Brazil organized by Joachim Lebreton. John VI, the king of Portugal living in exile in Brazil, invited the mission to establish an arts academy and introduce European Neoclassicism to Rio de Janeiro. Debret remained in Brazil until 1831. He was one of the founders of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and organized Brazil’s first and second public art exhibitions, in 1829 and 1830.

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In Brazil, Debret continued to make large Neoclassical paintings as a court painter. For The Landing of Doña Leopoldina, First Empress of Brazil (1816), for example, Debret framed the the arrival of Leopoldina with an architectural arcade and shows her surrounded by a crowd of military and aristocratic supporters. His portrait of John VI (1817) is reminiscent of portraits of Napoleon in its blending of military and imperial symbolism.

Nevertheless, Debret’s artistic reputation rests on less-official kinds of images, including genre scenes of Rio de Janeiro and “scientific-traveler” views of indigenous Brazil. Following his return to France, Debret published these images in three volumes entitled Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil (Picturesque and Historical Voyage to Brazil; 1834–39). Within them, he recorded his sometimes sardonic observations of both urban and rural Brazilian life. He depicted Brazil’s highest and lowest classes as well as its native peoples. Although Debret avoided stereotypes, his illustrations suggest that native Brazilians are “wild” or close to nature. The Signal for Battle, for example, shows an elaborately dressed warrior blowing a pipe while his nearly naked comrades hide in the jungle. Nature engulfs these figures, and they appear to be merely part of the landscape.

Debret’s urban imagery often examined the daily life of Afro-Brazilians, such as Carnival Scene, in which a woman carrying an enormous tray of fruit flees from the advances of a man while costumed revelers look on. Marriage of Slaves in a Rich House shows a ceremony attended by fashionably dressed slaves. In other images he depicted the brutality of slavery.