Aurélia de Souza: As Casas, at Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis, curated and authored by photographer Rui Pinheiro, introduces us to the work of Porto’s nineteenth-century painter from a different perspective: within her collectors’ households. Each photograph, between domestic and private, stillness and quietness, interiority and exteriority, the composition, lighting and one of Aurélia’s most frequent themes, the areas of her intimacy, family and work, reverberate. Scenarios of a female bourgeois life, spanning from the interiors of her home in Quinta da China by the Douro, where cooking, embroidery and reading were part of everyday life, to the surrounding gardens and landscapes, frequently captured from the inside out, through a window, a point of light, shining on an environment of solitude, seclusion and darkness.

The photographic project took shape as part of the centenary events commemorating Aurélia de Souza’s death (1866-1922), which, apart from the inauguration of the exhibition Vida e Segredo: Aurélia de Souza 1866-1922 (2022-2023) at Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis (MNSR), Porto, among other initiatives, also featured the completion of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, started in 2020 by the MNSR and Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in partnership with Universidade Católica do Porto and Matosinhos City Hall, aimed at tracking down, cataloguing and photographically archiving, in public and private collections, all the painter’s work. Whilst the MNSR possesses almost three dozen works, including the acclaimed Autorretrato do casaco vermelho (1900), many of the canvases, around four hundred, are believed to be in private collections (ninety-three owners have been identified to date). Owing to this daunting undertaking, the museum institution went to the collectors’ homes, leading to Rui Pinheiro’s work now on display.

Each photo only reveals the spot where the paintings are displayed in their owners’ homes. Private and domestic premises, denoting a bourgeois flavour, corners with all sorts of ornamental items, topped by the painter’s works. We usually only get the chance to see this art collection in museums or art venues, displayed and structured according to a curatorial study and perspective, giving us the opportunity to learn about and enjoy the paintings’ plasticity under controlled conditions optimised for the purpose. But Rui Pinheiro’s photographs reveal a whole other life for the works, intimate and almost secret, a place of family memories, surrounded by bric-a-brac, pictures, pots with floral arrangements, books or travelling objects, displayed according to their collectors, where sometimes we see patterns, tones, textures and figures similar to those of the paintings. For starters, we can look at Autorretrato com laço preto (1895), Cozinha Holandesa (1866-1922), or Rapariga das Argolas (1866-1922).

The more than thirty photographs are framed, coloured and lit to show Aurélia’s painted interiors, as for instance No ateliê (1916), a canvas in gloomy tones, with the artist lying on a desk with her back turned, where only a landscape painting is illuminated against a shuttered window. The same goes for Cena Familiar, Menina a escrever ao lado de vaso com chaga and Cena de Interior com Figura Feminina (works dating from 1866-1922), where each scene contains paintings hanging on the wall or a window in the background, focusing the light on an exterior that is lighter than the interior depicted. Particularly noteworthy is the renowned painting Entre o Almoço e o Jantar ou Interior (1884), in the MNSR collection, by João Marques de Oliveira, Aurélia’s professor at Porto’s Academy of Fine Arts. A familiar interior setting, with three young women sewing, surrounded by canvases hanging on the wall and lit by a large window in the centre, revealing a bucolic landscape, a Renaissance-influenced arrangement that can also be found in the painter’s works. Intriguingly, Aurélia also explored photography as an experimental medium, focusing on everyday scenes, not least because her neighbour, the pioneering photographer Aurélio da Paz dos Reis from Porto, taught her some concepts of that emerging craft. The photograph Grupo familiar na Quinta da China (1866-1922) once again shows a landscape painting in the composition, this time in the centre, next to a window as the spotlight, depicting an intimate scene in which people are enjoying a meal at the piano.

Taking images of paintings in private homes is a recurring motif in interior or architectural photography, frequently enjoyed by collectors who want to present their works to the general interest in specialised magazines. Nonetheless, we cannot overlook the fact that, since the dawn of photography, artists have also wanted to be photographed in their studios surrounded by their works, placing their artistic endeavours in a different light from that of museums, galleries and art venues, which would greatly influence the 20th century design of art and notions of institutional critique. Perhaps one of the most iconic projects was Constantin Brancusi’s studio, photographed by the American Wayne Miller. Similarly, the photographic series Louvre (2006-2007) by Candida Höfer, Museum Photographs (1989- ) by Thomas Struth, The Ghosts of Orsay (2020-2022) by Sophie Calle, Louise Lawler’s work, or Diane Neumaier, reveal another way of looking at how paintings and museum exhibitions are presented.

As Susan Sontag says in Essays on Photography (1977): «Like the collector, the photographer is driven by a passion which, even when it seems to be a passion of the present, is bound to a feeling of the past.»[1] In Aurélia de Souza: As Casas, Rui Pinheiro offers a series of fragments of the house interiors where Aurélia de Souza’s paintings are hung, reviving the painter’s work in contemporary terms, providing a new insight into her artistic praxis.

Aurélia de Souza: As Casas is on show at Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis until August 27, 2023.

[1] Sontag, S. (2012). Objectos Melancólicos. Em S. Sontag, Ensaios sobre Fotografia (pp. 55-85). Lisboa: Quetzal Editores. (p.81)