As a child, Antonio Parreiras was sent by his family, which did not approve of his artistic bent, to a boarding school named Liceu Popular de Niterói. In 1882, after his father’s death, Parreiras enrolled at the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. Two years later, he left the Academia to participate in the open painting course given by Georg Grimm (1846-1887) in Niterói. His first exhibition was held in 1886. He traveled to Europe where he attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, returning to Brazil to serve as a professor of landscape painting at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, a position which he later gave up to found the Escola do Ar Livre. Known as a landscape painter, his main subjects being the countryside, tropical forests and seascapes, Parreiras also developed a repertoire of portraits, nudes and historical scenes, as is the case of Iracema (1909), which is part of the MASP collection. In this painting, the artist depicted the denouement of the novel of the same name by José de Alencar (1829-1877) in 1865. Iracema, the indigenous heroine, is depicted in her suffering after being abandoned by her European lover. The figure derives from the paintings of the penitent Mary Magdalene in the desert and does not present indigenous features. The choice of these models indicates the tragic and violent character of the clashing between the colonizer and the colonized during the formation of Brazil.
— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017
One of the most famous and successful characters of Brazilian romantic literature, Iracema is a native Brazilian heroine after whom José de Alencar named his novel published in 1865. In 1884 this same character had already been the subject of the most well-known painting of Portuguese artist José Maria de Medeiros (1849-1926), currently conserved at the MNBA. Unlike Medeiros and the general run of paintings featuring Indians, Parreiras shows no interest whatsoever in the exotic aspect of this character, and paints her as she was featured in the last scene of the novel, immersed in pain after being abandoned by her lover.
— Unknown authorship, 1998
