Tereza de Arriaga (Belém, Lisbon, 5 February 1915 – 12 August 2013) was a Portuguese painter. She started with plastic arts motivated by Neorealism in the 1940s, developing into more abstract works of geometric character. At the end of the 1960s that her work became more consistent. Maintaining her social sensibility as an aspect of her plastic expression, she developed a deep exploration of colour and lines. Her works are simply signed as “Tereza Arriaga” or “Marriage”. Early life and education Tereza Arriaga, whose full name was Maria Thereza d' Almeida Pinheiro d' Arriaga, was the granddaughter of Manuel de Arriaga, the first President of the Portuguese Republic. She was born in the Belém Palace, because her father, Roque Manuel de Arriaga, was the personal assistant of the President and lived with his family in a rented part of the Palace. Due to the May 14 Revolt of 1915 which ended the presidential mandate, Arriaga had to leave the Palace under fire. When she was three, her mother died of the Spanish flu at age 27. Arriaga was educated in a culturally privileged and political environment where republican ideas prevailed, which helped her understand social problems at an early age. Her childhood was spent in Monte Estoril, where she was educated by her father and also by an English tutoress and at the religious boarding school Colégio da Pena, in Sintra. As this style of education did not achieve results, the family returned to Lisbon where Tereza finished her primary education at the private Colégio Inglês, or English College. Despite her father being a republican, her education tended towards the bourgeois ideal of the time: knowing how to write and read, how to play the piano and speak French. She tried to continue her piano studies, but by the end of her adolescence and she decided to prepare herself for the School of Arts. However, when she attended the studio of Raquel Roque Gameiro, the daughter of the watercolorist Alfredo Roque Gameiro, Raquel advised her to leave, saying what was taught and painted there would not satisfy Tereza at all. She attended night school at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes (SNBA), where she was the only woman. She was taught by Frederico Aires, who lent her plaster busts from his own studio for Tereza to practice drawing. One year later, she enrolled in the School of Arts to take a