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Saint John’s Night in Quinta da China Garden

Commented session,
15 June (6:30 pm) and 16 June (1:30 pm)
Registration,
comunicacao@mnsr.dgpc.pt
Observations
Minimum of 5 and maximum of 20 participants
Audience
Youth and adults

In this work, whose original title we do not know, Aurélia de Souza represents the garden space of her house, in Quinta da China, decorated for the festivities of São João.

Sitting on the floor, absorbed, a little boy in a sailor’s costume assembles (or dismantles?) the traditional paper balloons.

Whatever the moment fixed here (anticipation or end of the party?), in this painting some fundamental aspects of Aurélia de Souza’s entire work converge: a strong feeling of place (the city represented through an identity festivity and the house and gardens which the artist long and intensely inhabited), an avidity for everything that surrounds her as a potential theme for painting and a melancholy that seems immanent, inevitable to the point of manifesting itself even in her view of the childhood experience of a party.