Almada Negreiros and Pardal Monteiro | Murais Almada Gares Marítimas

When Almada Negreiros was commissioned to paint the maritime stations’ murals, he had already worked with architect Pardal Monteiro on two occasions.

At the same time as he was designing the maritime stations, Pardal Monteiro was entrusted with two other projects to which Almada would also contribute: the University City, where the artist was made responsible for the entire decorative work on the buildings’ façades, carried out with a incised drawing technique; and the renovation of the Ministry of Finance on Praça do Comércio, for which Almada created two oil paintings and designed two tapestry cards.

These projects would only be concluded in the second half of the 1950s. Almada would also have a prominent role in another project by Pardal Monteiro — the Ritz Hotel, for which he created a black marble mural with gold incised drawings and three tapestries. Pardal Monteiro would choose Almada once again to design a vast tapestry for the reading room of his last project, the National Library. But, with the architect’s death in 1957, the decorative project for the reading room was commissioned to another artist, Guilherme Camarinha.

Almada’s paintings for the two maritime stations are very different from each other, but they have in common the fact that they include depictions of riverside life on the Tagus banks.

In the maritime stations, Almada had an unusually large surface to work on, and the aim was for his mural paintings to be perfectly integrated into the modernist architecture of Pardal Monteiro. The wall space for these paintings was in what official documents call the “vestibule” but has since become known as the “great hall” — the 1st and 2nd class passengers’ arrival and departure lounge, with souvenir shops and wooden benches manufactured at the Olaio furniture factory. In the Alcântara Maritime Station, Almada painted eight surfaces measuring 6.20 by 3.5 metres, while in Rocha do Conde de Óbidos there were six surfaces of approximately 7.2 by 3.8 metres for him to work on. On this second project, Almada would be assisted by his wife, painter Sarah Affonso, so as to save on wages and keep the commission income within the family. It was Sarah Affonso who enlarged the sketches to scale and helped in the process of transferring them onto the walls.

Almada’s paintings for the two maritime stations are very different from each other, but they have in common the fact that they include depictions of riverside life on the Tagus banks. The selling of fish and the hardest activities, such as that of women coal vendors, as well as the poverty that plagued the riverside working class, would be elevated to the status of monuments in Almada Negreiros’ mural paintings.