2. tile production The Atlantic was Portugal’s demesne and its colonies in South America and Africa were some of Europe’s earliest. Each European country treated its colonial territories slightly differently within the overall lineaments of colonisation, depending on its particular history, its religion, its mentality. Resources were imported from colonies, people were exported to them, sometimes in complicated patterns of slavery, emigration and military occupation. Protestant countries such as England, the Netherlands and Germany treated indigenous peoples rather differently than did Catholic countries: apartheid rather than métissage . The interchange between Portugal and Brazil was intense. A large, new bourgeoisie of wealthy merchants and traders developed in the colonial advantages of Brazil, returning to Portugal where, historically, none had existed before. In the spirit of small town boys made good returning in a new Cadillac, Brazilian middle classes appropriated the use of tiles which hitherto had been hand-painted panels and panoramas for the church and the monarchy. When the earthquake of 1755 reduced Lisbon to rubble it spurred a housing boom that took the extravagant Brazilian use of tiles, which deflect intense solar gain, and applied it to cloudy, temperate Lisbon. The cultural seamlessness between Portugal and Brazil developed further when Napoleon was conquering 1830s Europe, France acquired, briefly, Portugal. The Portuguese royal family moved to Brazil, Dom Pedro IV declared himself Emperor of Brazil, Portugal and Angola: Portugal had become a de facto colony of Brazil. Napoleon’s defeat brought the monarchy back to its palaces of Lisbon and with it even more Brazilian emigrés. Their demand for tiles from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century changed production from rarified hand-painted allegorical scenes to democratised and everyday mass-produced pattern. This is a case where a kind of colonial sensuality rebounded to the core. Excess wasn’t just something that happened in that space of transgression that marked Europe’s attitudes to its various colonies, where rapacity, miscegenation and vulgarity could be practiced, but there supposedly stayed. No, in Portugal’s case, and it has to do with Brazil’s ascendence and transcendence of Portugal, a kind of excessive display came home and in a reverse colonisation revivified an unsustainable Iberian fragment on the Atlantic coastline of Europe.
this page: Rua da Boavista, 34-36. The stems that connect the leaves on both the ribbon border and the tile are drawn by hand. A brush also runs around the central circle to cover up the necessary gaps left by the stencil. On the ribbon border, a brush has dabbed in the shading on the ribbon. opposite left: Rua Eduardo Coelho, fundador do diario de Noticias 1835- 1889, 14, 14A. The same tile was on the Livraria Bertrand, Rua Anchieta, 3A at Rua Garrett. right: Rua da Boavista, 44. Tile repair: two pairs of different stencilled tiles and two hand-painted tiles.
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