Indianism

Indianism is an art movement. The gallery holds 1 work in this movement, including works by Victor Meirelles. Browse Indianism paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Indianism (Portuguese *Indianismo*) was a Brazilian literary and artistic movement that flowered during the first generation of national Romanticism, roughly the 1830s through the 1870s. Although indigenous themes had appeared in Brazilian writing since the colonial Baroque and Neoclassical periods—in the catechetical verse of José de Anchieta and the epics of Basílio da Gama and Santa Rita Durão—the movement crystallized only after independence from Portugal in 1822. Swept by post-independence nationalism, writers and artists searched for a figure who could personify the new nation, and, drawing on the European cult of the "noble savage," they fixed on the Brazilian Indian as a mythic ancestor and patriotic hero. The literary movement is conventionally dated from Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães's *Suspiros poéticos e saudades* and his journal *Niterói* (both 1836).

Indianism idealized indigenous people as dignified, valorous, and sentimentally noble, projecting onto them the virtues of a founding race while glossing over the violence of colonization. In poetry this produced the sonorous, patriotic verse of Antônio Gonçalves Dias, whose *I-Juca-Pirama* and *Marabá* became touchstones, and the unfinished national epic *A Confederação dos Tamoios* by Magalhães. In prose its great exponent was José de Alencar, whose novels *O Guarani* (1857) and *Iracema* (1865) gave the movement its canonical narratives—Iracema's union with the Portuguese Martim, producing Moacir, "the son of pain" and first mixed-race Brazilian, became its central founding myth.

In the visual arts, the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro promoted the Indian as the "true native hero," yielding an academic, European-trained painting steeped in literary sources. Victor Meirelles (1832–1903), trained at the Academia Imperial and a grant-holder in Rome, Florence, and Paris, painted *Moema* (1866), depicting the indigenous woman of Santa Rita Durão's epic *Caramuru* (1781), drowned in the surf as she pursues the ship carrying her departing lover Diogo Álvares. Rodolfo Amoedo's *Marabá* (1882) and *O Último Tamoio* (1883), and José Maria de Medeiros's *Iracema* (1881), mark a late, elegiac phase on the eve of the Republic.

Indianism preceded the introspective Ultra-Romanticism and the socially engaged Condorism, and although later modernists rejected its idealizations, it durably established indigenous representation—however romanticized—as a foundation of Brazilian cultural identity.