Georgina de Albuquerque

In 1922 Brazil marked 100 years of independence, and the usual way to paint that story was a triumphal scene of generals and battles. Georgina de Albuquerque did something different. Her large canvas Session of the State Council shows the quiet morning of 2 September 1822, with Princess Leopoldina, the Austrian-born regent, seated at the head of the table and running the meeting that set independence in motion while her husband, the future emperor, was away in São Paulo.

It was the first history painting by a Brazilian woman, in a genre that had been closed to them, and it appeared the same year that Bertha Lutz and other campaigners held the country's first feminist congress and pressed for the vote.

Georgina was born Georgina de Moura Andrade in Taubaté, in São Paulo state, in 1885, and had her first lessons at home from an Italian painter, Rosalbino Santoro. She studied in Rio de Janeiro under the painter Henrique Bernardelli, spent years in Paris after marrying the painter Lucílio de Albuquerque, and came home working in a bright, loosened, Impressionist touch still fairly new in Brazil.

She taught for decades at the National School of Fine Arts in Rio, and between 1952 and 1954 she served as its director. Session of the State Council hangs today in the National Historical Museum in Rio de Janeiro.