The 500 Drawings of Silva Porto in the SNBA collection” are mostly presented (drawings held by SNBA since 1893) with landscape themes from the Lisbon region. This is the largest exhibition dedicated to the painter Silva Porto, since the painting retrospective of the Soares dos Reis Museum, in 1993, in Oporto, and the largest exhibition of drawings by the painter, ever. This will be the first exhibition that SNBA prepares in partnership with CML, (Lisbon City Council) in the year that the city is distinguished as the European Green Capital 2020.
Silva Porto was born in 1850, in Oporto. His art education began in 1863, at the “Escola Industrial do Porto”, a pioneer school of mutual education that trained officers of industry.
In 1865, Silva Porto was admitted to the Oporto Academy of Fine Arts, where he attended all the courses available: Drawing, Architecture, Sculpture and later in 1870, after this impressive ensemble, he joined and attended the course in Painting for three years until 1873, when he prepared for the “Pensionista do Estado” (Pensioner of the State) course in France, attending the Academy of Fine Arts there for a further five years.
Returning to Portugal in 1879, he was appointed to replace the late Tomás da Anunciação, at the Lisbon Academy of Fine Arts. Dissatisfied with the triennial rhythm of the exhibitions of the Society for the Promotion of Fine Art, he sought an independent alternative for annual exhibitions with his students and followers: It was the “Cervejaria Leão” (“Lion” Beer-house) Group, that would annually exhibit between 1881 and 1888, soon to be appreciated for its novelty and quality.
The life path of Silva Porto allows us to appreciate his transition from romantic formation, based on an idealization of man and landscape, to later assume a new radical and modern manner by representing for the very first time, the landscape as truly experienced and recorded from first-hand experience, rather than as previously rendered idealistically.
