A series of documents kept at the National Archive of Tombo Tower in Lisbon offers us important tools to understand the origin of the 1 81 6 Artistic Mission. Although some Brazilian historians have already explored this field extensively - including Afonso d'Escragnolle Taunay, Mário Barata and Mário Pedrosa in their invaluable publications, not to mention Jean-Baptiste Debret in his writings - it is important to shed new light on this subject so that we may understand how the project of art and industrial education was conceived in Europe byJoachim Le Breton. How did the Mission's project come about? This paper proposes to review certain letters kept at the Tombo Tower and exchanged between Portuguese diplomats and Le Breton in 1815, while the latter was still in Paris, for the ultimate purpose of retracing the first steps of this story.
French Artistic Mission; Joachim Le Breton; Arts teaching; Jean-Baptiste Debret