Portugese artist, Maria Aurélia Martins de Souza's 155th Birthday

 

On 13 June, 1866, Maria Aurélia Martins de Souza was born to Portuguese immigrants in Valparaíso, Chile. 

The family lived in Brazil and Chile, before moving back to Porto, Portugal in 1869, when she was three years old. 

They lived in the Quinta de China, near the Douro River, in a home bought by her father, before he died in 1874, when she was eight years old. 

It was on these idyllic banks that de Souza began to paint and draw at the age of 16. 

After only three years, she painted her first self-portrait, an art form that became her hallmark. 

In 1893, de Souza further refined her talent, in the Portuguese tradition, as a student of the Porto Academy of Fine Arts. 

De Souza moved to Paris in 1899, where she was an apprentice of several French masters. 

After one year in her new home, she captured herself dressed wearing a red-coat in the oil painting, “Self-Portrait,” a work widely regarded as her most famous. 

De Souza’s paintings were regularly featured at her alma mater, just one of the many prestigious Portuguese galleries that championed her work. 

In addition to her lifelong work as a painter, de Souza also illustrated for Portuguese magazines and the 1913 short story entitled “Perfis Suaves” (“Smooth Profiles”).  

She died in Porto in 1922, at fifty-five years old.