Domingos Sequeira and his greenish friends

Why I fell in love with a painting in Lisbon's National Museum of Ancient Art

This is one of the first posts I wrote for The Broken Compass, just over a year ago. I’m bringing it out from behind the paywall and reposting it because there are many more readers now – for which, a thousand thanks – and it should therefore be new to most of you. (Plus, of course, I really like it!) For those dear and loyal readers who were here at the beginning, I hope it will appear no more irksome than a familiar friend…

Was it judgement that Domingos Sequeira lacked, or was it luck? There is little doubting his talent as an artist – he has been called “the greatest Portuguese painter since the fifteenth century” – but he seems to have had a talent for picking the wrong side too, an awkward gift for an artist in an age of private patronage and political turbulence.

But let’s back-track.

We had the good fortune to visit the somewhat misleadingly named National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon a couple of weeks ago. It is full of great art in the European tradition of the Old Masters, as well as some extraordinary works that came from the marriage of Portuguese art and the art of those places that Portugal colonised in its long imperial history. (It also had a mesmerising collection of medieval Nottingham alabaster, but more about that another time.)

But there were two works, above all others, that struck me. And they were both by Domingo Sequeira.

In all honesty, Sequeira is an artist whose work I have only been dimly aware of. I may be wrong, but I think that most people in the UK share my ignorance. The Art UK website, which lists holdings of art in public collections, only throws up two paintings of his, one at the Ashmolean in Oxford, the other at Brodick Castle in Scotland. In fact, I’m only aware of one significant work of his on public display here, which is the magnificent silver service which he designed for the Duke of Wellington as a gift on behalf of the Portuguese government following Wellington’s defeat of Spain and, more importantly, Napoleonic France in the Peninsula War. ‘Magnificent’ doesn’t really cover it: containing over 1,000 pieces, the intensely allegorical, baroque collection reportedly took 142 silversmiths in Lisbon’s arsenal over five years to produce.

In some senses you might say there is no such person as Domingos António de Sequeira. Or at least that there was a degree of self-invention. He was born into a poor fisherman’s family in Faro, on Portugal’s southern shores, in 1768. His birth name was Domingos António do Espírito Santo. The new name, the new identity, was borrowed from his godfather in 1785 when he was 17 and his gifts had already been discovered.

By 1788, having exhausted the artistic education available to him in Lisbon, he was sent to the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, where he built a formidable reputation. Returning home in 1795, he found that reputation only got him so far: the wealthy clients of his homeland found his prices too high.

It seems characteristic that in the last years of the century his disappointment – perhaps despair – at the progress of his artistic career was so acute that he joined a Carthusian monastery at Laveiras, west of Lisbon, as a novice. Say what you like about Sequeira, he didn’t do things by halves. He remained there for three years, continuing to produce religious paintings as he had in Rome. St Bruno, founder of the Carthusians and patron saint of the possessed, was a particular favourite.

Sequeira emerged, however, in 1802 as court painter to to Dom João, the Portuguese prince regent. A few years later, he was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Academia da Marinha in Porto. And there he might have happily stayed, had Napoleon not invaded Portugal in November 1807. I said at the top of this that Sequeira arguably had questionable judgement. His response to the invasion of his homeland by the French was to produce a number of allegorical paintings celebrating Napoleon and Jean-Andoche Junot, the general at the head of the invading army. One of these, painted in 1808 and titled ‘General Junot Protecting the City of Lisbon’, shows the Portuguese capital personified as a young woman seated but reaching up her hand in pathetic gratitude towards the French general. (It’s now in the Soares dos Reis National Museum in Porto.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of Sequeira’s compatriots took a dim view of this sort of thing, and the artist spent six months in prison as a result. One wonders if the Wellington silver was some kind of penance for him, enforced or otherwise.

Sequeira’s full-throated support for the liberalising convulsions in Portuguese politics in 1820 and subsequent years resulted in exile for him when the counter-revolution came. After a couple of years in Paris he settled again in Rome in 1826. He never saw Portugal again. His health deteriorated, and after 1832 he was unable to paint. A new radical government seized power in a coup in September 1836. It sought to honour him at last, but he died in Rome the following year before news arrived. As ever, his luck was awry. He had the misfortune to be a contemporary of Goya’s too; they are often compared, always to Sequeira’s disadvantage.

It’s from his time in Rome that one work of his at the museum caught my eye. It is one of four large-scale preparatory sketches for a life of Christ that he worked on there in the late 1820s and which are gathered here in a single dedicated space on the ground floor. This one is ‘The Adoration of the Magi’. Like the others, it is achieved with just charcoal and chalk. They are all astonishing, but the presence of light in this one is in every sense revelatory: I can’t offhand think of another work that gives such a powerful sense of grace descending, of its mystery and wonder.

Light, or the space that light operates in, takes up the top half of the image; but even in the lower, human half it is the intercession of light that they huddle around, drawn forward from the dark perimeters but also overawed and retreating, forced into reticence and humility. But there is something about the material too, the delicate, powdery, dusty quality of the chalk and charcoal seems to underscore human frailty and insignificance. Indeed, some of the figures seem to be emerging from and receding into dust, into a desert storm, as if they were of the same element in figurative as well as literal terms. Works in oil are comparatively robust, but here there is also an immanent sense of how vulnerable the artist’s marks are; the work seems to exist in a kind of extended, infinite suspense over which the possibility of erasure hangs.

Have a look at the finished painting here. Then come back and look at this one. To me, for all its technical skill and gorgeous colour, the painting itself is too smooth and polished. To be sure, the light there is remarkable, but the intensity with which the coronal sun burns through the veils of cloud dominates the canvas, and the visceral emotion and drama of the sketch has almost entirely drained away. There is no tension or awe; the mood is relaxed, almost conversational.

Now let’s head up to the top floor of the museum and the work for which we came here, reproduced at the top of this piece. I’m not sure it has a title as such, but in the museum it is given the name of its two principal subjects: João Baptiste Verde and Mariana Benedita Vitória Verde, a brother and sister. It was painted in 1809 – I think in the latter half. Sequeira was released from his six-month spell in prison, mentioned above, that year.

João, who is probably 34 years old here, was a merchant with a premises in Rua do Arsenal in the centre of Lisbon but a block back from the city’s vast riverfront. It’s said that people visited the shop just to hear his wisecracks. I don’t know how true that is, but Sequeira’s portrait here certainly looks to be that of a man who thinks he is funny. His uniform looks a touch absurd, but it was real enough: João had joined the Voluntário Real do Comércio at the end of January 1809. It was a volunteer regiment of merchants formed in response to the crisis presented by the Napoleonic invasion.

As such you might think João would despise Sequeira as a collaborator. But as well as being a merchant, João was also an aspiring artist and the two men were close friends. Indeed, it was down to the good offices of João that Sequeira was released from prison at all. The painting was a thank you. It’s not very clear in my photograph, but there is writing on the wall behind the figure in the background – more of him later – which describes the work as a gift to “my greenish friend”. (Verde, as might be obvious, is Portuguese for ‘green’.)

The text on the wall makes reference to the genius of gratitude too – and you could say that the gorgeous light that falls on brother and sister alike is a kind of benediction in itself. But other ways to express gratitude were available, not least a straightforward portrait by a man who was by then one of Europe’s leading artists. It’s not difficult to imagine how that one might have looked: the two subjects would be presented, either standing or seated, much more rigidly, backs straight, shoulders back, eyes staring defiantly, self-importantly back out at the viewer. This is not that painting.

Perhaps it is unfair to say that João’s uniform looks absurd, but I think he does seem self-consciously absurd in it. Look at his posture, for instance: shoulders down, stomach out. Why would Sequeira paint him like that? Like a lot of great portraits, perhaps a lot of great painting per se, you feel like you are seeing a moment from a story in motion. Yes, that moment is arresting; but it asks so many questions about the before and after. Which is to say, you are persuaded that this is life. And life, in this instance, looks a little like a joke the two men are sharing.

The man in the background with – yes, now you mention it – a cherub on a lion’s back is Sequeira himself. I can’t read the iconography, but perhaps there is a point here about innocence taming the martial beast. How to read the lines of sight though? The cherub looks up at Sequeira, Sequeira looks and gestures at some unseen point behind his friend. João points at his friend but looks out at the viewer with an expression that is likewise difficult to parse. It seems to combine hauteur and humour, as if he is a little dazed at the absurdity of the scene he is gesturing towards.

But the reason I fell in love with this painting is the woman sat on the right, João’s sister Mariana, who is 31. Does it change how you read the image to know that Sequeira, that slightly pathetic figure in the far background, married Mariana, the inscrutably beautiful woman in the foreground, the same year he finished this portrait? They married on 16 October in Lisbon’s Basílica de Nossa Senhora dos Mártires, so they may well be married already here.

How would you read the look on her face, her posture? To me, the look says something like, ‘Really? This?’ Or possibly, ‘So are we done yet?’ She looks at once patient and tired of being patient, exasperated, her indulgence of the two doofuses in her life wearing thin. She is so immediately, vividly alive it takes my breath away. Whatever luck or judgement Sequeira lacked in other areas of his life, he surely chose right when he married her. Sequeira and her brother are both absorbed in their roles and in whatever allegorical and other symbolism they want to freight the image with. She is part of the painting, but she is outside of it too - apart certainly from the world of the lion and the cherub. The intersection of allegory and reality in the painting is, if not actually uncomfortable then certainly awkward, even absurd. You feel that she thinks so too.

It has been heartbreaking, then, to learn when researching this that Mariana died in childbirth less than five years later on 15 February 1814. The son she gave her life for died when he was three. Sequeira was left with their daughter, also named Mariana. He never married again. His daughter must have been with him in Rome when he died, because I have read that the family had to pawn the sketch of ‘The Adoration of the Magi’, and its three companion pieces, to keep their heads above water, and there was no other family left. So much for luck.

I read all that and then returned to look at the painting. How attentively Sequeira has painted the shimmering silk organza on her dress and captured the sensual indifference of that one ungloved hand – perhaps that too suggestive of impatience – and the resistant weight of the arm that her brother is lifting. I find myself thinking how much Sequeira must have loved her to paint her so honestly, and to present her in a way that somehow defies any attempt on his part to fit any meaning to her. She wouldn’t have had it otherwise, you think. Sequeira had to invent himself; Mariana, on the other hand, is so superbly herself she seems indomitable. Watch her: she is always on the point of shaking off her brother’s hand, standing up and walking out of the frame, muttering something darkly under her still-living breath.