page_title: João Maria Correia Ayres de Campos, 1st Count of Ameal
section_title: The art collection
hierarchical_section_title: João Maria Correia Ayres de Campos, 1st Count of Ameal / The art collection
caption_attribution_description: English: The palace of the Counts of Ameal at Rua da Sofia, in Coimbra. The building, which still retains most of its late-gothic interiors in spite of its external neoclassical design, now serves as the city's court house - the Palácio da Justiça.
context_page_description: João Maria Correia Ayres de Campos, 1st Count of Ameal, GCC, CvNSC, OOPA was a Portuguese politician and antiquarian, best known as a great art collector, maecenas and bibliophile. He is renowned chiefly for having assembled one of Portugal's largest and most important private art collections, as well as what was at the time the largest private library in the country; his collections are also famous for having been auctioned en masse after his death in 1920, leading to the largest auction recorded in the Iberian peninsula on that decade. Several pieces belonging to him have since been incorporated in the collections of the Louvre, the Prado, the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon and the Soares dos Reis National Museum in Porto.
context_section_description: João Maria Correia Ayres de Campos began to amass his large collection in the 1880s. Having bought the 16th-century buildings of the old friary and college of Saint Thomas (formerly one of the religious halls of the University of Coimbra and a base of the Dominican Order) he transformed them into a vast palatial residence, with the complex's original Renaissance-style cloister as a centerpiece. The palace's monumental Italianate portico, one of its most remarkable original features, has since been relocated to the Machado de Castro National Museum. Over the years, its rooms, several of which still retained their original gothic form despite the building's soberer classical exterior, would be filled with precious furniture, Old Master paintings and about 30.000 rare books, while the palace grew into a vibrant cultural salon.
  His collection of paintings, which at its height amounted to more than 600 pieces displayed across 10 saloons, included a canvas then attributed to Caravaggio (Saint John the Baptist), one large drawing by Rembrandt (Head of a Man), a large Glorification of the Virgin by Rubens, The Earthly Paradise by Jan Brueghel (now in the Louvre) and two portraits of saints by Zurbarán. The collection further contained two canvases by Murillo, three by Greuze, four by Ribera and one canvas and four aquatints by Goya, as well as a large collection of watercolors by Turner and Delacroix.
  Ameal also gathered a considerable selection of oil paintings and drawings by Salvator Rosa, an artist then virtually unknown in Portugal but one of his favourite painters, which he procured through emissaries in Italy.
  An admirer of contemporary Portuguese painters, particularly of the Realist school that was then at the height of its popularity, the Count of Ameal also owned a large selection of canvases and drawings by José Malhoa, Columbano and António Silva Porto. Of the latter, he possessed the famous The Boy and His Sheep, now in the Soares dos Reis National Museum in Porto. He sponsored some contemporary Portuguese artists, namely Silva Porto's disciple Ezequiel Pereira, whom he sent to Paris and Brittany in the 1890s.
  Towards the end of his life, the Count came to assemble a large collection of gothic sculpture and painting, as well as one of late-medieval and early-modern Portuguese religious painting (the latter chiefly purchased after the suppression of the property of the religious orders by the Republicans in 1910).
  Other important parts of the Count's collection were his selection of porcelain and Islamic faience, mostly Iberian and late-medieval, which amounted to around 800 pieces, and his numismatics collection, begun already by his father, which comprised 3558 coins.
  Upon the Count's death in 1920, his widow and heirs decided to sell most of the collection, as well as to donate the palace that housed it to a religious order. For that purpose, a major auction was hastily organized in July 1921, the biggest event of the kind in the history of auctioneering in Portugal. Both the British Museum and the Louvre sent emissaries to the event, the latter having acquired a large number of porcelain pieces and most of the Count's collection of Islamic faience.
  The sale of Ameal's immense library in 1924 was described in a series of chronicles by Gustavo de Matos Sequeira in the periodical O Mundo, later compiled in the book No Leilão Ameal (1925). These record the sale of his extensive collection of illuminated manuscripts, as well as of his edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle and other incunabula.
caption: The former palace of the Counts of Ameal at Rua da Sofia, in Coimbra. The building now serves as the city's court house - the Palácio da Justiça.
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