---
title: "José Antônio da Silva: paintings of rural Brazil"
description: "Look at four paintings by José Antônio da Silva, from cotton harvesting and rural workers to Rosinha's portrait and the fields of São Paulo's interior."
canonical: https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/jose-antonio-da-silva-paintings/
lang: en
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
translations:
  en: https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/jose-antonio-da-silva-paintings/
  fr: https://chicodasilva.org/fr/articles/jose-antonio-da-silva-peinture/
  pt: https://chicodasilva.org/pt/artigos/jose-antonio-da-silva-pintura/
---

Art and artists

# José Antônio da Silva: paintings of rural Brazil

Look at four paintings by José Antônio da Silva, from cotton harvesting and rural workers to Rosinha's portrait and the fields of São Paulo's interior.

In one painting, six people gather cotton in front of a field dotted with felled tree trunks. In another, the same crop fills almost the entire canvas: hundreds of small white marks rise towards the clouds. José Antônio da Silva (1909–1996) returned to rural subjects many times, changing his colours, the scale of his figures and the way he applied paint.[^colheita][^lindo]

Born in Sales de Oliveira, in the interior of São Paulo state, Silva worked on the land before his paintings were exhibited. His canvases draw on that experience and on experiments with form that extend to portraiture and repeated brushstrokes. Four works offer a way to follow those choices.[^ibere][^mac2013]

## From farm work to exhibitions

Silva was self-taught. In 1946 he took part in the inaugural exhibition of the Casa de Cultura in São José do Rio Preto, where his paintings attracted critical attention. His first solo exhibition was held at Galeria Domus in São Paulo in 1948. The following year, his autobiography, *Romance de minha vida*, was published with support from the former Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo.[^ibere][^mac2013]

Museums became part of his career early on. MASP received *Colheita de algodão* as a gift from Procópio Davidoff in 1949 and acquired *Homens serrando toras* in 1950. Silva won an award at the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951 and took part in the Venice Biennale in 1952 and 1966.[^colheita][^toras][^mac2013]

The countryside he painted had an economy and a history. In the 2025 catalogue *Pintar o Brasil*, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro connects Silva’s vast fields to the intensive agriculture that supplied Brazil’s modernisation. His reading brings the work of farming and the transformation of the land together.[^catalogo]

## Colheita de algodão, 1948

![Six workers gather cotton into heaps and baskets in the foreground; behind them, white rows cross a field of felled trunks and leafless trees.](https://chicodasilva.org/editorial/jose-antonio-da-silva/colheita-algodao-1280.jpg)

*Colheita de algodão (Cotton harvest), 1948. Oil on canvas, 50 × 100 × 2 cm.

José Antônio da Silva. MASP collection, MASP.00337. Gift of Procópio Davidoff, 1949. Photograph: João Musa. [MASP collection record](https://masp.org.br/acervo/obra/colheita-de-algodao).*

Orange and blue clothes separate the workers from the dark background. On the left, a tilted basket pours out cotton; nearer the centre, a figure carries a white load on their head. Heaps and containers fill the bottom of the canvas. The painting’s width gives us room to follow each gesture before looking across the field.[^colheita]

Behind the figures, the white rows narrow with distance. A reddish path cuts diagonally through the crop, while leafless trees interrupt the field. Stumps and logs remain among the plants. Cotton harvesting shares the land with the traces of tree clearing.

MASP’s curatorial team compares the foreground to a stage on which six figures arrange the cotton. This observation draws attention to the difference between the large people near the edge and the expanse of cultivated land behind them.[^colheita]

## Homens serrando toras, 1948

![Three men in hats work around a large dark log, one kneeling on top; saws, stacked boards and stumps fill a green and grey landscape.](https://chicodasilva.org/editorial/jose-antonio-da-silva/homens-serrando-toras-1280.jpg)

*Homens serrando toras (Men sawing logs), 1948. Oil on canvas, 40 × 60 × 1.5 cm.

José Antônio da Silva. MASP collection, MASP.00338. Acquired in 1950. Photograph: Eduardo Ortega. [MASP collection record](https://masp.org.br/acervo/obra/homens-serrando-toras).*

An enormous log crosses the picture. Its yellow cut end faces left; a man kneels on top of the wood to work. Two others appear below. Their arms lead the eye towards the saws, and a stack of boards extends to the lower edge.[^toras]

Greyish green earth and brown wood dominate the scene. The orange shirt of the man above and the yellow ends of the trunks concentrate the few warm colours. The scale of the log makes the bodies seem small beside their task.

Painted in the same year, this canvas and *Colheita de algodão* show two stages in the transformation of the countryside: worked timber and cultivated land. In both, Silva places human effort close to the viewer.

## Retrato de minha mulher Rosinha, 1957

![A woman in profile holds a flower near her face; yellow, green, white and red dabs cover her hair, skin and dress, against a landscape with a road.](https://chicodasilva.org/editorial/jose-antonio-da-silva/retrato-rosinha-640.jpg)

*Retrato de minha mulher Rosinha (Portrait of my wife Rosinha), 1957. Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 69.7 cm.

José Antônio da Silva. MAC USP collection, 1979.2.238. Gift of Theon Spanudis. Reproduction: MAC USP; photographer not identified in the record. [MAC USP collection record](https://acervo.mac.usp.br/acervo/index.php/Detail/objects/20401).*

Rosinha appears in profile with a flower near her face. A road climbs on the left and disappears among trees. Her figure fills almost the entire height of the canvas, with the countryside continuing around her.[^rosinha]

Small dabs of paint cover her skin, hair and dress. The sequences change direction with each part of the body: they follow the face, descend along the neck and cross the torso. Yellow, green and red recur in different areas. Repetition builds volume while keeping the outline of each area visible.

The painting was part of Theon Spanudis’s gift to MAC USP. Studying that group in 2013, Ana Magalhães showed how the critic sought to connect Silva’s experiments with Brazilian concrete art. The portrait provides a place to observe the organisation of the painted surface that interested this collector.[^rosinha][^mac2013]

## Lindo lindo lindo, 1976

![A red path divides a blue-green field down the middle; curved rows of white dots lead to a high horizon where the cotton meets a band of clouds.](https://chicodasilva.org/editorial/jose-antonio-da-silva/lindo-lindo-lindo-1280.jpg)

*Lindo lindo lindo (Beautiful beautiful beautiful), 1976. Oil on canvas, 73.5 × 99.5 cm.

José Antônio da Silva. MASP collection, MASP.01627. Gift of Breno Krasilchik, 2015. Photograph: Eduardo Ortega. [MASP collection record](https://masp.org.br/acervo/obra/lindo-lindo-lindo).*

A red path divides the field down the middle. Rows of cotton curve on either side and converge towards the top; near the clouds, white paint almost covers the surface. A few birds cross the sky, and no workers are visible.[^lindo]

Seen beside the harvest of 1948, the painting shows how far Silva could change his treatment of one subject. Here the horizon sits near the upper edge, and the crop extends towards the viewer. The dots are spaced at different intervals, although from a distance they seem to form a regular pattern. The title is written diagonally in the lower left corner.

In their MASP text, Adriano Pedrosa and Olivia Ardui connect this work to the increasingly abstract character of Silva’s landscapes in the 1970s. Their reading starts from visible choices: the approximate symmetry, the central path and the repetition of white marks.[^lindo]

## Silva and naïve art

The terms “naïve”, “primitive” and their Portuguese equivalents belong to the history of Silva’s reception. In their text for MASP, Pedrosa and Ardui criticise the hierarchy these labels can create between self-taught artists and styles accepted as high art. Magalhães places his entry into museums within the modernist debates of the 1940s and 1950s, when the idea of the “primitive” coexisted with the advance of abstraction.[^lindo][^mac2013]

The four paintings show what a broad label leaves unexplained. Silva changes the size of people, the distance of the horizon and the width of his brushstrokes. Dabs of colour build a portrait; decades later, the same device structures almost an entire cotton field. The history of these classifications and of other painters is discussed in [Chico da Silva and Brazilian naïve art](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/brazilian-naive-art/).

## Where to keep looking

MASP and MAC USP provide collection records and reproductions of the works discussed here. The digital catalogue for *Pintar o Brasil* extends the journey through religious scenes, still lifes and self-portraits. The exhibition ran at the Musée de Grenoble from 12 April to 6 July 2025 before travelling to Fundação Iberê. Its records bring together paintings from public and private collections.[^catalogo][^grenoble][^ibere]

[^colheita]: MASP. [*Colheita de algodão*, 1948](https://masp.org.br/acervo/obra/colheita-de-algodao), MASP.00337. Collection record and text by the curatorial team, 2015, reproduced from *MASP de bolso* (2020). In Portuguese.

[^lindo]: MASP. [*Lindo lindo lindo*, 1976](https://masp.org.br/acervo/obra/lindo-lindo-lindo), MASP.01627. Collection record and text by Adriano Pedrosa and Olivia Ardui, 2019. In Portuguese.

[^ibere]: Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro. Introduction to [*José Antônio da Silva: Pintar o Brasil*](https://iberecamargo.org.br/exposicao/jose-antonio-da-silva-pintar-o-brasil/). Fundação Iberê, 2025. In Portuguese.

[^mac2013]: Ana Magalhães. [*José Antonio da Silva em dois tempos*](https://repositorio.usp.br/directbitstream/4bc22ca3-ca4d-44d8-91b9-b179e0ba1e23/ANA43_joseantoniosilva.pdf). MAC USP, 2013, unpaginated exhibition leaflet, inside face: curatorial essay and checklist. Portuguese and English.

[^toras]: MASP. [*Homens serrando toras*, 1948](https://masp.org.br/acervo/obra/homens-serrando-toras), MASP.00338. Collection record and reproduction. In Portuguese.

[^catalogo]: Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro. “José Antônio da Silva, pintor do Brasil”, in [*José Antônio da Silva: Pintar o Brasil*](https://iberecamargo.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/catalogo_jose-antocc82nio-da-silva-pintar-o-brasil-1.pdf). Fundação Iberê, 2025, pp. 7–11, especially p. 8. In Portuguese.

[^rosinha]: MAC USP. [*Retrato de minha mulher Rosinha*, 1957](https://acervo.mac.usp.br/acervo/index.php/Detail/objects/20401), 1979.2.238. Collection record, reproduction and exhibition history. In Portuguese.

[^grenoble]: Musée de Grenoble. [*José Antônio da Silva (1909–1996): Pintar o Brasil*](https://www.museedegrenoble.fr/3312-jose-antonio-da-silva-pintar-o-brasil-1909-1996.htm). Record of the 2025 exhibition. In French.

## Related reading

-   [Chico da Silva and Brazilian Naïve Art](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/brazilian-naive-art/)