The work of wood crafts in the Luso-Brazilian context (XVIII-XIX centuries)

Abstract

Manual workmanship in the 18th century was closely linked to intellectual knowledge, applied simultaneously with practical teaching to train new craftsmen. However, at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, this tradition of teaching and production is put in check with the emergence of the Industrial Revolution. This research intends to look at and give visibility to this transition period: that of the last decades of craftsmanship, raised to its highest degree of perfection, and the beginning and development of the industrial production of objects. The methodological basis will be based on the reading of printed primary written sources of reference for the period, printed primary written sources related to the trades dedicated to wood and carpentry manuals and guides published in France, Portugal and Brazil in the early nineteenth century. With the dismantling of the craft trades and the teaching of apprentices with their masters, such publications assume a role of safeguarding a dissolving knowledge. This written documentation counts, in some cases, with illustrations that would be adopted as visual primary sources, added to the accompanying texts, for the understanding of how the woodworking trades, Carpentry, Joinery, Carving, and Assembling were formulated, from a practical and theoretical point of view. The written and visual primary sources will be crossed with secondary sources, composed of specific bibliography on applied arts and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, as well as dedicated to the transformations and relations between art, craft and its transition to the industrial process. This European context, especially the Portuguese, will be referential to observe the unfolding of this process in Brazil in the late XVIII and early XIX centuries. (AU)