‘Peculiar circumstances of the land’: Artists and Models in Nineteenth‐Century Brazilian Slave Society

Abstract

The essay situates the members of the French Artistic Mission of 1816 and their successors within the visual economy of nineteenth-century Brazil. It follows the adaptations of academic artists and their students to the aesthetics and labour market conditions of the largest and most enduring slave society of the Americas. The evolution of a pedagogical aesthetic of the human body, via instruction from the modelo vivo (artist’s model), and the associated labour relations of life modelling in the context of widespread slaveholding are the two primary concerns. The research considers the career of the artist’s model in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (AIBA), from the ad hoc recruitment of seemingly suitable individuals to the subsequent formalization and casualization of life model employment that accompanied the long arc of the last four decades of the transatlantic slave trade, gradual abolitionism, the expansion of free-wage labour, and the early consolidation of a post-emancipation, republican order.