The artist, not the art - photographs of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso

It was only this: I had an image that I wanted to include in one of my vast "Randomly" posts, and I Google Imaged it to see if there was anything/anyone I should make note of. When I discovered that it was a Portuguese painter I'd never heard of, I Googled him further and found all these wonderful photographs; such a face, such character. Then, naturally, I was very curious about his paintings; would they be as visually interesting as the artist himself? Hmm, well... oh, but that face!

Domingos Rebêlo, de Souza-Cardoso, Emmérico Nunes, Manuel Bentes, and José Pedro Cruz, Paris, 1908. A parody of Velazquez's "Los Borrachos."

De Souza-Cardoso (at right) with friends at the studio of Emmérico Nunes, Paris, circa 1907-09.

De Sousa-Cardosa (center) with Alves Cardoso and a friend.

At the Château de Keriolet, Brittany, 1912. (Four images.)

Emérico Nunes, Manuel Bentes, de Souza-Cardosa, and unknown (misidentified as Alexandre Ferraz de Andrade), Paris, circa 1907-09.

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Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (14 November 1887, Mancelos – 25 October 1918, Espinho), Portuguese painter who, influenced by Cubism and Futurism, is considered one of the first modern Portuguese painters. From a wealthy rural family, one of nine children, at the age of eighteen he entered the Superior School of Fine Arts of Lisbon and one year later - on his nineteenth birthday - he moved to Paris. He intended to continue his architecture courses but soon quit to focus on painting instead. Financially supported by his parents, he rented a series of studios and socialized with other Portuguese émigrés. But he eventually drifted away from his compatriots, becoming close friends with many of the multi-national writers and artists - Modigliani, Gris, Severini, the Delaunays, Brâncuși, Archipenko, Max Jacob - who were gathered in Paris prior to the First World War; for a time he rented a studio next door to Gertrude Stein on the rue de Fleurus. In 1911, his work was shown in the Salon des Indépendants. Two years later, he participated in two seminal exhibitions: the Armory Show in the USA, which traveled to New York City, Boston, and Chicago, and the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon at the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin; he was among the most commercially successful of the exhibitors at the Armory Show, selling seven of the eight works on display. With the outbreak of war the following year, he was forced to return to Portugal. There, he reestablished his artistic connections and friendships, and he also married. But he died only four years later, one of the countless victims of the Spanish Flu pandemic. He was less than a month shy of his thirty-first birthday.