Historical context
Alfredo Norfini was an Italian academic painter who emigrated to Brazil in 1894 and spent the rest of his career painting Brazilian historical and landscape subjects. He produced this Fazenda da Barra — Campinas, 1840 in 1920, eighty years after the scene it depicts. The painting is a retrospective — a 20th-century reconstruction of an 1840 Brazilian coffee plantation.
The fazenda in the title was a real property in Campinas, São Paulo, one of the interior coffee plantations that drove the Brazilian export economy from the 1830s onward. The structures depicted — the long arcaded casa-grande (plantation house), the drying terraces, the church at the rear — are typical of the period.
Technically Norfini paints with a Neapolitan academic finish — tight modeling, even atmospheric light, the morning mist soft over the coffee rows. The Museu Paulista holds roughly a dozen of his Brazilian landscape canvases, several of which are retrospective in the same sense as this one.
The file is a 4384 × 2836 px photographic reproduction from the Museu Paulista’s digital repository, released as Public Domain. The canvas is large in its original form; the file carries cleanly to 16 × 11 inches and pushes to 20 × 13 inches before the brushwork softens.
Catalog
| Artist | Alfredo Norfini Italian, worked in Brazil, 1867–1944 |
|---|---|
| Title | Fazenda da Barra — Campinas, 1840 |
| Year | 1920 (depicting an 1840 scene) |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Original size | academic canvas scale |
| Holding | Museu Paulista da USP, São Paulo |
| License | Public Domain |
| Archive № | CA-008 |
Print specifications
Shelf-scale piece. The landscape composition holds at small size; the architecture remains legible.
The size at which the casa-grande, the drying terraces, and the coffee rows are all simultaneously readable. Walnut frame, mid-weight cream mat.
Pushable for a feature wall. The Norfini brushwork starts to flatten; we’d choose 16 × 11 unless wall scale demands more.
Source statement
Digital source: Museu Paulista da Universidade de São Paulo (MP-USP), digital repository. Released to Public Domain. Photographic credit: José Rosael / Hélio Nobre, Museu Paulista da USP.
Original work: Alfredo Norfini (1867–1944, Italian, worked in Brazil), Fazenda da Barra — Campinas, 1840, oil on canvas, 1920. Acervo Museu Paulista, USP, São Paulo (Coleção Fundo Museu Paulista).
Restoration notes. Conservative color balance; the morning haze of the canvas is preserved. No retouching applied to figures or to the painted surface.
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