no court that sponsored it or academies that taught it; the territory was a Portuguese colony and its painting, almost entirely based on religious worship, was made in a corporative and semi-artisanal system. When Joachim Lebreton, the leader of the French Artistic Mission, defined the structure of the first academy in Brazil in a memorandum to king John VI in 1816, historical painting was already "provided for" in the curriculum, since Lebreton, himself an academic, merely traced his project based on the structure of the Academy in Paris, reputed to be the most advanced of all that existed at the time throughout the West. However, as its tropical version took a long time to work and Brazil, an independent Empire since 1822, was in perennial upheaval and could not present anything too grandiose to be proud of in the face of a disaffected population still indifferent to the academic arts, the genre did not immediately prosper. The examples left by the French Mission painters, Jean-Baptiste Debret and Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, were rare, very modest in scale and did not always portray Brazilian events. Nationalism had not yet been added to the mix, the political usefulness of the Academy at this point was not yet understood, there was little funding for it, and it was not even an official priority to maintain it. This unfavorable scenario was the simple expression of a frontal clash between two opposing realities: a Brazil still baroque, religious and semi-savage, and a neoclassical, secularized and sophisticated France. The French knew the difference, and made a point of pointing out their "superiority", but to make matters worse, these French painters were former bonapartists, supporters of the one responsible for the invasion of Portugal and the escape of the Portuguese family to Brazil. Thus, on the one hand, they were a threat to Baroque artists and, on the other hand, they were viewed with suspicion by English diplomats, who exercised great influence on official decisions. The government, for its part, had many other problems to solve. Once Brazilian independence was proclaimed, Pedro I soon abdicated the throne and the country was headed by a regency, entering a tumultuous period. Adding to the adverse factors, it took decades before the Brazilian Academy could function on a regular basis and take root in its aesthetic and ideological principles. Meanwhile, the styles changed once again, Brazil absorbed other European influences and romanticism