landscape measuring 115 meters wide by 14.5 meters high, depicting the entrance of the loyalist fleet in Guanabara Bay, an episode of the Armada Revolt of 1894, which he carried out practically without any assistance both in the painting and in the administrative tasks of the exposition, contacts and sponsorship searches. Without a steady job, tired and living basically on the income from visits to his panoramas, Meirelles got into serious financial difficulties when the government demanded, in 1898, that he dismantle the rotunda, after which he survived on the help of friends. In 1900, his Panorama do Descobrimento do Brasil, still unfinished, was shown in the exhibition of the Fourth Centenary of Brazil's Discovery, as the last attempt to revive his career, as mentioned by Mário Coelho. The exhibition was inaugurated in the presence of president Campos Sales, who described the work as extraordinary. He set up another exhibition pavilion on a farm in the former São José Seminary, at the back of the Carmo Convent, but the panoramas were no longer new and attracted fewer and fewer people. Meirelles still had the idea of ​​exhibiting them in Europe again, trying to gain the government's interest, but the plan came to nothing. The artist ended up donating the paintings to the National Museum, as well as many drawings and studies, but they were damaged and lost years later through the institution's negligence. Disappointed, poor and abandoned, on the morning of a Carnival Sunday, on 22 February 1903, Victor Meirelles died at the age of 71, in the simple house where he lived. The artist was married to Rosália Fraga, who already had a son from a previous marriage, whom Meirelles adopted, but he left no direct descendants and nothing is known about his private life. His widow donated her estate to the National School of Fine Arts, which held a posthumous exhibition in Meirelles honor. The widow died shortly afterwards, in the same year. According to Carlos Rubens, his biographer, shortly before Meirelles death he would have told a friend and former disciple that if he had another chance he would make his life take other paths, to which the friend replied: "And what other paths would take you to the First Mass?" As history shows, Meirelles current fame rests mainly on this composition. Works Context and style Victor Meirelles flourished at a critical moment in Brazilian history. Independent