Saudade

In our days, if we want to send a message to someone, it's very simple: just send an email. In the 19th century, when the painter José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior (1850-1889) lived, however, letters were practically the only resource. If the sender in question was someone very dear, the letter ceased to have a simple informative or communicative aspect and began to have an emotional dimension, such as the lady's case in this masterpiece: Saudade, produced in the last year of the artist's life. Almeida Júnior was murdered by the husband of a woman with whom he had had an affair for several years.

The composition shows a young woman dressed in dark clothes leaning against a window, holding a letter. On the left side of the painting, we see a straw hat, common in rural places, evidencing that there exists or could exist a male presence—the hat's owner, perhaps her husband. You can see that she is a deeply unhappy woman: a stubborn tear trickles from her eyes to her nose and and she holds the shawl tightly, twisting her fingers. The painting’s atmosphere is composed of solitude and sadness, from the house structure (it evidently needs repairs) to the woman's state of commotion, with narrow eyes denoting the longing and sadness that causes her to read the letter.

The absence of the hat's owner on the scene may suggest, along with the name of the painting, that she is a young woman with a broken heart. The word saudade, derived from Latin, means not only the loneliness or the lack of someone, but that lack that we somehow like to feel when we have affection for something or someone and lose it, yet we continue returning to the memory saved somewhere in our heart.

- Rute Ferreira