José Pancetti

To survive, he worked in different places and different crafts until, in 1921, he moved to São Paulo again, where a businessman, also of Italian origin, offered him a job as a painter of walls and posters, which seems to have been his first contact with painting.

[3] In that same year, the painter Adolfo Fonzari offered to Pancetti an opportunity to assist him in decorating the house of another Italian in the coast of Guarujá.

He did this with such a zeal that his fame spread throughout the Navy until an admiral created a cadre of experts in the profession and appointed Pancetti as its first teacher of painting.

And so Pancetti began to draw and to paint postcards with landscapes, seascapes and romantic sceneries, still quite clumsy, but which already showed his considerable artistic potential.

[5] During the São Paulo Constitutional Revolution of 1932, Pancetti watched and painted a scene depicting a warplane downed by machine guns of the cruiser "Rio Grande do Sul" on board of which he was.

He died in 1958 in the Naval Hospital of Rio de Janeiro and was laid to rest in the São João Batista cemetery in the quarter of Botafogo.

After his death, his fame grew very much, and his paintings are highly valued and command one of the best selling prices among Brazilian modernist painters, nowadays.

[12] "Certa vez, não sei como, tive vontade de pintar aquilo que meus olhos viram na louca carreira do mar...".