José Veloso Salgado (Orense, Spain, 1864 – Lisbon, 1945) came to Lisbon at ten years old to work as an apprentice at his uncle’s lithography workshop. In Lisbon, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts where, between 1883 and 1885, he was a student of Simões de Almeida and José Ferreira Chaves. He distinguished himself as a student and showed his work, as early as 1884, at the 13th Exhibition of Sociedade Promotora de Belas Artes, for which he obtained an honourable mention. In 1888, already as a Portuguese citizen, he went to Paris with a State scholarship, where he completed his training at the École des Beaux Arts, particularly in the studios of Cabanel, Laurens, Constant, Cormon and Delaunay. Between 1890 and 1894, he showed his work at the Salon, at the Antwerp Universal Exhibition and at the Munich Art Exhibition; during this period, he continued to send works to Lisbon, that were shown at the Exhibitions of Grémio Artístico. He was also elected Academician of Merit by the Academy of Fine Arts of Lisbon. In this period, he received various prizes and medals, namely with the panel Amor e Psiché, in 1891. After he finished his scholarship, he returned to Lisbon in 1895 where he joined the faculty at the Fine Arts School, first as substitute teacher and then as full scale teacher in 1897. He was a teacher of Historic Painting, a genre at which he excelled, as he did with landscape and portrait, always within the naturalist aesthetics. In 1896, he received a gold medal at the Berlin Universal Exhibition, and two years later, within the context of the commemorations of the Centennial of India’s Discovery, he won a contest with the work Vasco da Gama perante Samorim (1898). In the following years, he had various public orders, such as the decoration of the Courtroom at Palácio da Bolsa in Oporto, the Sala dos Actos of the new building of the Lisbon Medical School, the Artillery Museum, among others. He continued to show his work regularly, such as in the Dresden International Art Exhibition, in 1901, and at the exhibitions of the Fine Arts National Society, between 1909 and 1940. In 1939, the Academy of Fine Arts organised a large retrospective exhibition of his work.
FMV, July 2020
