The First Mass in Brazil

Victor Meirelles painted Brazil's founding moment in Paris. On a scholarship from Rio's Imperial Academy, the young artist spent 1859 to 1861 in Europe reconstructing a scene from 26 April 1500, the first Catholic Mass on Brazilian soil at Porto Seguro, which he knew only from a letter the scribe Pero Vaz de Caminha had sent home to the Portuguese king. He arranged the colonists and the curious Indigenous onlookers in a wide circle around the friar raising the chalice. When it hung at the Paris Salon in 1861, it was the first time a Brazilian painter had reached that stage. The image went on to fill Brazilian schoolbooks, stamps and banknotes for generations.