Victor Meirelles

A country that had declared itself an empire only a few decades before needed pictures of its own beginning, and Victor Meirelles painted one of the most famous. He made The First Mass in Brazil between 1859 and 1861, and he made it in Paris, far from the coast it shows, while living on a scholarship from Rio de Janeiro's Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. The canvas imagines the Catholic mass said for the Portuguese fleet in the year 1500, with Indigenous people watching from the edge of the forest. Critics have long called it the first great work of Brazilian painting.

Meirelles was born in 1832 on the island of Santa Catarina, in the far south, and his gift carried him to Europe and then into the favour of the emperor, Pedro the Second, who wanted art that would give his young country a shared past to look at. In 1875 the emperor's circle set him a harder task, an enormous picture of the Battle of Guararapes, a 17th-century fight that had driven Dutch forces out of the northeast. Meirelles travelled to the actual ground to sketch it and worked at the canvas for four years. It measures about 5 by 9 metres.

Both paintings hang today in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, the Battle of Guararapes filling almost an entire wall.