Purple Magazine
— Travel F/W 2014 issue 1
Bordallo Pinheiro Garden _ Lisbon _ Portugal
text by JOÃO BASTO
photography by GIASCO BERTOLI
Formerly known as Jardim do Bucho, the Bordallo Pinheiro Garden is not exactly what you would expect to find surrounding the Palacio Pimenta, a somewhat austere 18th-century museum dedicated to the history of Lisbon. Set adjacent to the palace, but secluded behind high walls and reached via sinuous alleyways leading from a Baroque central pond, lies one of the most extraordinary environmental interventions in the city — an extravagantly surreal collection of thousands of late 19th-century objets d’art.
Made from glazed earthenware, these naturalistic replicas of mammals, reptiles, shellfish, crustaceans, and birds make up only a small part of a collection of thousands of pieces originally created by Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, a vibrant and prolific 19th-century Portuguese caricaturist and pioneer of the country’s Arts & Crafts movement. Inspired by his counterparts in Britain, a middle-aged Pinheiro moved away from Lisbon to open the Faience Factory of Caldas da Rainha, an age-old traditional pottery hub in central Portugal. There, until his death in 1905, he ran a dynamic and prolific workshop staffed by talented apprentices whose work can also be found in the garden and the fascinating and deliciously quaint museum that takes his name, just opposite, on the west side of the Campo Grande park.
In January 2010, the garden reopened to the public, transformed by the contemporary Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, who is celebrated for her large-scale sculptures, such as The Bride (a chandelier strung with tampons), Marilyn and Dorothy (stilletos assembled from stainless steel pans and lids), and Red Independent Heart (made of translucent plastic cutlery). The effect is a site-specific wonderland of colorfully glazed faience shaped like dormant giant snails sheltered under shady nooks, lizards and snakes creeping between leaves, monkeys suspended from trees, sunbathing frogs and water-spitting toads, and sea horses frolicking in the pond, to name just a few of the specimens living in this most secret of Lisbon’s public spaces.
