Museu do Pontal

This guide to Museu do Pontal in Rio de Janeiro follows Jacques van de Beuque, a Frenchman who arrived in 1946 on the advice of painter Candido Portinari and meant to stay only months. Instead he spent four decades crossing Brazil, gathering nine thousand wood and clay figures made by roughly three hundred self-taught, mostly unknown artisans: circus performers, dancers, spinning tops, kites, whole miniature crowds caught mid game. The collection later moved to Barra da Tijuca, into a building set inside ten thousand square meters of garden.