Ham's Redemption, in Portuguese: A Redenção de Cam; is an oil painting by Galician painter Modesto Brocos in 1895. Brocos completed the work while teaching at the National School of Fine Arts of Rio de Janeiro. The painting deals with the controversial racial theories of the late nineteenth century, and the phenomenon of the search for the gradual "branqueamento" (or whitening) of the generations of the same family through miscegenation. The work earned Modesto Brocos y Gómez a gold medal at the National Salon of Fine Arts in 1895, and is an example of the direction Brazilian art took in the late nineteenth century.
Description and analysis of painting The painting is the fruit of a moment of post-emancipation, marked by the adhesion of racialism in the public sphere and the "necessity" of actions in relation to the destiny of the black and mixed population in the free and republican order. The painting alludes to the first book of the Bible, Genesis, Chapter 9. In the episode, a drunk and naked Noah is exposed, instead of covered, by his son Ham to the latter's brothers Shem and Japheth. For bringing shame upon him, Noah condemns Ham to be a slave along with his son Canaan, who is cursed as "the servant of the servants". Noah prophesied that he, Ham, would be "the last of the slaves of his brethren." Ham was later described as the supposed father of the African races. This was a basis for white Christians from the 16th to the 17th centuries to justify slavery in colonial economies. The painting shows a sort of reversal of the "curse" of African descent. The work is notable for its artistic realism, showing gradations of skin color between the three generations. The baby is the whitest, followed by the father, sitting next to the mother, who holds the child in her lap. The grandmother, in the left corner, has the darkest skin. She is raising her hands to the sky giving thanks. By being born white, her grandchild was freed from the "curse" of being black, since her daughter, a mulata, had married the white man. This gradation of color notably follows from left to right, showing the process of miscegenation. Here, it is not only a question of cultural and racial elimination, but also of the desire for progress that, in Brocos's eyes, would come only through the "laundering" of the population and the approximation to European culture, eliminating and ignoring other ethnicities and customs. This denial of African culture becomes apparent in the clothes of the female figures; both women wear westernized clothes instead of clothes that recall their African descent. The seated woman is fully clothed, making her look more European than African. This presents the ideal of a black women's adjustment to Christian morality and "whitening reproduction". In addition, it is notable that the two characters who do not have white skin are women: the mother and the grandmother, establishing a color opposition to the baby and the father. This is reinforced by the fact that the man is standing on stone, showing an "evolution" in relation to the bare earth under the women's feet. Once again, the white-skinned European is shown as superior, and this is evident even in his pose: his back is turned as he looks at the rest of the scene. The position of the hands and gazes between the characters brings coherence to the message that Modesto Brocos wanted to pass. There is also a theory that the young mother alludes to the Blessed Virgin Mary and the baby, the Child Jesus. This is due to the woman's shawl being blue, which is linked to Mary in art. The period in which the work was produced was marked by intense scientific development; however, in referring to the biblical episode narrated in the book of Genesis, the perspective of The Redemption of Ham seems more based on religion than science. The work reflects the racist ideologies of the time by showing the laundering passed on by the family members as something to be praised. As Tatiana Lotierzo and Lilia Schwarcz point out in the article "Gender, Race and Whitening Project: The Redemption of Cam" the adult women in the painting are shown to be voluntarily participating in a process that would extinguish their own ethnic group. The work became the mark of an era that, imbued with racialist thought, left indelible marks in the Brazilian tradition.
Background: Whitening (Branqueamento) and eugenics in Brazil
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