Rosa Ramalho

Rosa Barbosa Lopes, known as Rosa Ramalho, was born on 14 August 1888 in the hamlet of Cova, in Galegos São Martinho, Barcelos, and died in the same parish on 24 September 1977. The daughter of a shoemaker and a weaver, she never went to school and at the age of seven went to work for a neighbour who modelled clay figures. Heir to the nineteenth-century tradition of Barcelos figurines, she learned to make small pieces glazed in the colour of the region’s utilitarian pottery and to paint figures with non-ceramic paints.

She married the miller António Mota at 18, with whom she had eight children, and for almost fifty years set clay aside to devote herself to the mill and her family. After her husband’s death in 1956 she returned to figurine making, selling her work at fairs and pilgrimages throughout the country, above all in the Porto region. In the mid-1950s students from the Porto School of Fine Arts took an interest in her work, which began to appear in newspapers and magazines, and she was "discovered" by António Quadros. From 1958, at the suggestion of the painter Jaime Isidoro, she signed her pieces with the monogram "RR". Her production then shifted from toys sold mainly at fairs to collector’s pieces, sold in galleries and craft fairs and often larger in size.

She began with unglazed biscuit figures painted green, red and blue with non-ceramic paints or left unpainted, later moving on to glazed pieces, above all in honey brown. From tradition she took subjects such as the king and the soldier on horseback, the hen with chicks, the yoke of oxen, the lion, the lizard and hybrid animals, adding scenes of everyday life, such as the pig slaughter, women in ox carts and musicians, and religious subjects that earlier figurine makers had not dared to tackle, such as Christs, Last Suppers, nativity scenes, processions, saints, angels and Queen Saint Isabel. Her world of monsters, peopled by werewolves, witches, devils and shapeless figures born of childhood fears, set her apart from the region’s other clay modellers. Her figures, grotesque, brightly coloured and strongly three-dimensional, made her one of the best-known Portuguese figurine makers, admired by many intellectuals of her time.

In 1964 she received the medal "As Artes ao Serviço da Nação" at the Cascais Craft Fair and the prize for the best set of figurines at the Barcelos Craft Competition. She held many exhibitions in Portugal and abroad. In 1986 her work was included, as an example of popular art, in "O Fantástico na Arte Portuguesa Contemporânea", curated by Rui Mário Gonçalves at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Modern Art Centre, and in 2021 she was represented in "Tudo o que eu quero. Artistas Portuguesas de 1900 a 2020" at the same Foundation. The Fundação D. Luís I in Cascais devoted to her the exhibition "Rosa Ramalho: As Escolhas de um Colecionador", with more than a hundred pieces from the collection assembled by Tito Iglésias.