Homem com Chapéu e Cigarro de Palha

Van Emelen's portrait of a man wearing a hat and smoking a straw cigarette belongs to his systematic documentation of Brazilian social types at the Ipiranga Museum. The straw-wrapped tobacco cigarette — the cigarro de palha — was characteristic of Brazilian rural and working-class culture, and van Emelen's inclusion of this detail signals his interest in the specific material culture of Brazilian society rather than generalised ethnographic types. These individual character studies constitute a distinctive contribution to the visual history of Brazil around 1900.

The portrait is handled with the informal directness appropriate to a character study rather than a formal commission. The sitter's distinctive hat and the cigarette function as cultural identifiers, and the composition gives as much weight to these attributes as to the sitter's features.