RAFAEL BORDALO PINHEIRO
by Marshall P. Katz ©1998

" . . . . many people believe I got a late start modeling clay when I was already grown. They're wrong. Growing up in my father's house, I was accustomed to modeling. I've always lived among artists, my own family." Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro

The most famous and successful Portuguese ceramist in history is virtually unknown in the United States except in knowledgeable ceramics circles. Rafael Augusto Bordalo Pinheiro (1846-1905) was born in Lisbon into a family of distinguished artists. He was one of nine children many of whom continued the family artistic tradition. Around the age of eleven, Rafael received his first lessons in drawing and modeling in his father's workshop, and three years later was enrolled at a nearby fine arts school, Liceu das Merceeiras. Despite his art training, Rafael displayed an inclination towards acting, and upon graduation joined a local dramatics society. At first he made repairs to stage sets, but eventually he secured minor acting roles and was later accepted to the prestigious Escola Dramática (School of Dramatics).

In 1863, Rafael's father, Manuel Pinheiro, not wanting the son to squander his arts education, secured a civil servant job for him in the Câmara dos Pares (similar to the House of Lords in England). Probably to please his father, Rafael applied simultaneously to a civil arts school taking a variety of courses including ancient Greek and Roman architectural design. He spent all but his drawing classes making caricatures or cartoons of his teachers.

THE ARTIST'S FAMILY

Rafael Pinheiro's father was a respected, well-established artist, and many of his children achieved similar or greater success. We have no direct evidence of their influence on Rafael, but we can assume their talents and early accomplishments played a role in his later development.

Manuel Maria Bordalo Pinheiro (1815-1880), Rafael's father, was a civil servant and a painter of some acclaim. His works hung in many collections, including that of Dom Fernando II, who owned five of Manuel's paintings. Manuel was a prodigious artist, having produced an extraordinary number of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and engravings. His paintings, influenced by the Flemish School, were so meticulously rendered that he received commissions to reproduce the works of Velazquez, Lurillo, and several great Parisian painters. In his varied artistic career, he also designed and fabricated models and clothing for numerous theatrical productions and illustrated literary publications.

Maria Augusta Pinheiro (1841-1915), Rafael's older sister, was trained as a painter, but became a nationally renowned lace designer having won a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1889. She collaborated with Rafael as a ceramics painter and established her own ceramics workshop for women.

Columbano Pinheiro (1875-1929). This brother, nearly thirty years younger than Rafael, became a noteworthy painter who exhibited in Paris and later in Lisbon. Today his works hang in the Lisbon Museum of Contemporary Art, of which he was the first director.

Feliciano Bordalo Pinheiro (1847-1905), a more contemporary brother to Rafael, was a retired army colonel in 1883, when he persuaded Rafael to help him establish a ceramics factory in Caldas da Rainha, a small town sixty miles north of Lisbon that traced its pottery-making tradition to ancient times. In 1884, while the new facility was being erected, Feliciano arranged for Rafael to experiment with clays and glazes at the workshop of Francisco Gomes Avelar (fl. 1875-1897), a local Caldas ceramist. Feliciano served as the first production manager of the Pinheiro brother's factory until about 1892 when he retired from the business.

Two other brothers and a sister pursued careers outside the arts, but they still engaged in sculpture, drawing, and engraving as avocations.

EARLY YEARS

In 1866, at age twenty, Rafael married Elvira Ferreira de Almeida, but his dedication to drawing was so consuming that he even made sketches, watercolors, and charcoal drawings during his honeymoon. By 1870, his drawings had turned into full-scale political and social caricatures and were appearing in magazines and pamphlets. In 1871 and 1872, his drawings—in particular, two large works entitled "Village Wedding" and "Village Funeral"—won prizes at exhibitions in Lisbon and Madrid. He even exhibited with his father in 1868, and with his brother, Columbano, in 1874. At the same time, he continued drawing caricatures and cartoons, which began to receive increasing public recognition. In 1870, he launched his first publication, O Calcanhar de Aquiles (Achilles Heel), the first true political caricature album in Portugal. In 1871 and 1872, he published two additional caricature pamphlets, Berlinda (Game of Forfeits) and Binóculo (Opera Glasses), but sales were disappointing. The following year, he traveled to England while drawing for several international magazines, including Illustracion de Madrid, Illustracion Española y Americana, and the London Illustrated News. His watercolors were also reproduced in the Almanac of the London Illustrated News.

In 1875, after co-publishing a short-lived magazine, Lanterna Mágica, Rafael was invited to Rio de Janeiro in August to direct a satirical magazine, O Mosquito. One year later he moved his family to Rio de Janeiro and remained there four more years, having enjoyed considerable success, purchasing the magazine, and publishing booklets of political caricatures. In 1879, Pinheiro returned to Lisbon and continued publishing his political cartoons and satire to a receptive public. Throughout his life, he would publish newspapers, journals, magazines, booklets, and books containing his political satire and caricatures. His last magazine, Paróda, was started in 1900, only five years before his death.

It is evidence of Rafael's seemingly inexhaustible creative energy that he also steadily produced drawings, watercolors, and illustrations and devoted twenty-one years to ceramics.

FIRST CERAMICS PERIOD 1884-1885

It was his brother Feliciano's urging for partnership that drew Rafael to the full-time profession of ceramics at age thirty-seven. Feliciano had been a frequent visitor to the spa at Caldas da Rainha and an admirer of the local ceramics industry and the beautiful countryside. Convinced that the pottery factories there were primitive and outmoded, Feliciano gathered a group of investors, including his friend, Felisberto José da Costa, and persuaded Rafael to lend his artistic talent to a modern enterprise. In October 1883, Feliciano drew plans for the new business, Fabrica de Faianças das Caldas da Rainha (Faience Factory of Caldas da Rainha). Rafael moved with his family to Caldas the next April, purchased land for the new factory, and immediately began using the Avelar facility for experimentation and training. Rafael plunged himself into clay working and produced a small number of early pieces that today are in museums and private collections.
In September 1884, the initial phase of the new factory was completed. Rafael assumed artistic direction while his brother managed the plant. At first the factory concentrated its production on industrial products such as construction brick and commercial floor and wall tiles. The factory contained what was then state-of-the-art equipment, including stamping presses, glass mills, paint mills, seven tile kilns, three kilns for artistic ware, two large Minton1 kilns for sandstone tableware, and a calcination kiln. By June 1885, the second phase of the factory was completed, permitting production of a full line of decorative and household tableware. The final phase, for producing large quantities of commercial tableware would not be equipped until 1888.

Rafael threw himself into his work with such passion that the factory achieved high-quality production almost from the start, yet Feliciano's contributions to this success are unknown. In 1885, the company exhibited at the Portugal Commercial Exhibition in Lisbon and conducted significant business there. Despite numerous orders, however, the factory was underfunded. Rafael sought government support by inviting his friend, Emidio Navarro, Minister of Public Works, to visit the facility. Navarro commissioned a public works ceramic sculpture project and proposed an annual subsidy that would begin in 1887 if the company would teach ceramics modeling, painting, glazing, and firing to students from the Industrial School of Caldas da Rainha. The contract would last for fifteen years, matriculating a maximum of 150 students per year.

SECOND CERAMICS PERIOD 1886-1889

For the next several years, Rafael continued to oversee the factory's artistic direction. Unfortunately, he and his brother were poor businessmen, and the enterprise which employed more than fifty workers, continued to decline. Nevertheless, Rafael produced a prodigious number of works whose variety of colored glazes, intricate modeling, depth of color, and artistic design brought the ceramist fame. The works in which he represented crustaceans, batracians, and other sea life were influenced by two concurrent revival movements that had begun centuries earlier. The more important was the Manuelino decorative style, which originated during the reign of King Manuel I (1495-1521) and derived from sea forms such as shells, fish, coral, and waves, and from nautical images such as anchors, ropes, nets, and navigating instruments. This uniquely Portuguese artistic style influenced not only the decorative arts, but architectural decoration and sculpture. The mid-nineteenth century also witnessed the beginning of a revival of Palissy2 ware, a sixteenth-century style of ceramics—mostly plates, platters, and vessels—that depicted sea, pond, and river life, including fish, frogs, snakes, reptiles, and foliage. This revival movement was begun in France in 1843 by Charles-Jean Avisseau3; it spread principally to England and Portugal. Thanks to a potter named Manuel Cipriano Gomes (who adopted the last name Mafra), Caldas da Rainha became the Portuguese center for Manuelino and Palissy ceramic wares. In 1853 Gomes had opened the first pottery in Caldas to make these ceramic wares, establishing an international following that lasted to the end of the century. Many other ceramists adopted the Mafra style and opened workshops in Caldas, among them José A. Cunha, Francisco Gomes de Avelar, and José Francisco de Sousa.

The sales of Manuelino-type and Palissy-inspired ceramics, notwithstanding Rafael Pinheiro's extraordinary artistic gifts, could not generate enough revenue to overcome lagging household ware and commercial tableware that were the mainstay of the business. By 1889, despite a very successful commercial exhibition in Oporto4 that same year, the factory needed another cash infusion. The Portuguese government granted a loan that staved off impending bankruptcy and enabled the company to exhibit at the Paris International Exhibition later in the same year. The exhibition was a great success: Raphael Pinheiro received the Legion of Honor from French president, Sadi Carnot; the factory was awarded gold and silver medals; and the company received many orders, some paid in advance. Whether the orders were misplaced is not known, but none was ever delivered. Thus began a final decline in the affairs of the enterprise that Pinheiro was never able to reorganize.

THIRD CERAMICS PERIOD 1889-1905

During this period Pinheiro's creative output was unabated. He created many of his greatest works including in 1889, a monumental, eight-foot urn entitled Jar to Beethoven, which is now in the collection of the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Fine Arts. A similar masterpiece, Talha Manuelina, was executed in 1893-1894.

Despite Rafael's efforts, by 1892, the deficit of the factory in Caldas da Rainha had become so great the original shareholders were forced to forfeit their holdings to the Bank of Portugal. Through Rafael's friendship, dating back several years, with the governor of the bank, Júlio Vilhena, Pinheiro was appointed director of operations, although he gradually relinquished responsibilities to others.5 Even so, between 1888 and 1904, the company received gold exhibition medals in Oporto (1888), Paris (1889), Madrid (1892), Antwerp (1894), Oporto (1895), and St. Louis, Mo. (1904).

Pinheiro retired to Lisbon from Caldas da Rainha in 1900, transferring total direction of the factory to his son, Manuel Gustavo Bordalo Pinheiro (1867-1920), also a gifted artist. Rafael continued a number of artistic activities, including the sculpting of terra cotta busts. He also took up publishing again in 1900, but died five years later.

As a lasting memorial to his father, Manuel Gustavo designed a handsome portrait-relief of Rafael which can be seen in the Rafael Bordalo Museum in Lisbon. After Rafael's death, the factory began to lose its reputation and was put up for auction. It was purchased in 1907 by new shareholders, but stayed in business only a few years; it was eventually demolished. In 1908, Manuel Gustavo erected a factory on another site, but it too only operated a short time and was later dismantled.

CERAMIC TILES

Any full discussion of Pinheiro's work must cover not only his artistry but also the commercial side of his ceramics. This is not where his heart led him; in fact this man of creativity and vision had so little interest in utilitarian ventures that it was a wonder the company survived his lack of attention to these concerns. Even so, Pinheiro enjoyed near-spectacular success with the introduction of high-relief, hand-painted and highly glazed wall tiles. Interior and exterior home tile decoration in Portugal which had reached its zenith around the end of the eighteenth century, revived briefly in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth.

When Pinheiro returned from the Paris Exhibition in 1889, influenced by the French wave of art nouveau, he designed and executed his finest examples of tile art; these are considered the best ever made in Portugal. During the next ten years, Pinheiro received numerous commissions from wealthy patrons, some of which can still be seen in Lisbon. Many of these tiles are still reproduced in Caldas da Rainha, but the reproductions lack the crisp detail and thick glaze of the originals.

POSTHUMOUS EVENTS

In 1922, a group of Caldas businessmen, including a member of the Pinheiro family, acquired the home and land of Manuel Gustavo Bordalo Pinheiro, along with the original factory molds. They erected a new factory (since rebuilt) on this site, which today employs 350 workers and exports eighty percent of its production, largely to the United States. The new company, called Faianças Artísticas Bordalo Pinheiro produces a variety of dinner and tableware. Nearby, the home of Manuel Gustavo has been preserved as a museum, where visitors can gaze upon the original works and molds of Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro. The Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro Museum in Lisbon was dedicated to this great ceramist's memory in 1924; it contains an extensive collection of his greatest works, from political cartoons and caricatures to monumental ceramics.

Footnotes

1 A type of kiln invented by the Minton factory in Stoke-On-Trent, England.
2 Bernard Palissy, 1510-1590, was a French potter who perfected lead-glazing and popularized rustic ware, ceramic plates and vessels that bore relief images of pond and river life.
3 Charles-Jean Avisseau, 1795-1861, born in Tours, France, was the discoverer of Bernard Palissy's lost secrets of lead-glazing and enameling; he was the most important maker and reviver of Palissy-inspired rustic ware.
4 The second largest city in Portugal, Oporto is an important seaport, industrial area, and distribution center for Port wine, once Portugal's largest export.
5 Surprisingly, no further mention of Feliciano could be found in our research, so we must assume he had disassociated from the company by this time.