Decoying Countrymen

Almeida Júnior's Decoying Countrymen (Caipiras Negaceando, 1888) is one of his most important works — a scene of caipira hunters using a call to lure birds, capturing the rural culture of the Brazilian interior with the kind of loving, respectful attention he brought to all his São Paulo backlands subjects. The painting was made the year after his return to Brazil following Paris training and belongs to the series of caipira subjects that established his reputation as Brazil's most important realist painter. The Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio holds it as a canonical work of nineteenth-century Brazilian art.

Almeida Júnior renders the hunters in their natural environment with careful attention to the specific quality of Brazilian interior light — dappled, warm, filtered through tropical vegetation — quite different from the controlled studio light of European academic practice. The figures are integrated into the landscape rather than posed against it.