Museu Nacional de Belas Artes

This guide to the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro traces the strange origin of Brazil's first fine arts academy: a French secretary named Joachim Lebreton, ousted from Paris after refusing to return paintings looted by Napoleon's armies, who recruited a crew of exiled painters and architects and sailed them to a court that had itself fled to Brazil. Among them were the painters Jean Baptiste Debret and Nicolas Antoine Taunay, and the architect Grandjean de Montigny, tasked with building an academy from nothing in a city that had never had one. Lebreton died in Rio in 1819, only three years after landing, with the school still without a permanent home.