The son of circus artists, Bernardelli attended the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, where he was a student of Victor Meirelles (1832-1903) and Zeferino da Costa (1840-1915), was already living. Bernardelli traveled to Rome, where his brother, the sculptor Rodolfo Bernardelli (1852-1931). After eight years in Europe Bernardelli returned to Rio de Janeiro where he began to lecture at the National School of Fine Arts (1891-1906). This work is representative of Brazilian artistic production in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Art from this period of transition between the Empire and the Republic is characterized by the development of landscape and genre painting. Such is the case with Interior with Girl Reading, in which a peasant girl seated on a table reads a letter in the light entering from a window at her back. The glow illuminates her barren environment: a terracotta floor, a stool, and a wooden chest, as well as the fabric and sewing supplies from her interrupted work. Bernardelli’s paintings, which directly took on themes like misery and immigration, were interpreted as signs that the system imposed by the Imperial Academy, which valued history and religion, themes linked to the bourgeoisie, was crumbling.
— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017
By Luciano Migliaccio
Dating from Henrique Bernardelli’s stay in Italy (1878-1885), the work Interior with Girl Reading reflects the new qualities that his painting came to represent in the eyes of young artists and reform critics of the latter years of the Empire. On this subject, art critic Gonzaga-Duque wrote in A Arte Brasileira (1887): “His work is vigorous and full of daring. Yes, full of daring! Because it is new, because it surpasses the decrepit systems of academic style, because it imparts the essential nature of the object, and as H. Taine puts it, because it is personal and true”. Bernardelli’s realism, derived from a certain type of anecdotal Tuscan (such as that of the Gioli brothers) or Neapolitan painting, was sufficient for those who sought renewal of Brazilian art based on the new French-influenced naturalist literature, exemplified by the work, the model of the positivist republicans.
— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998
