Maria Luísa de Sousa Holstein, 3rd Duchess of Palmela (4 August 18412 September 1909) was a member of the Portuguese nobility who became known for her sculptures, which were exhibited at the Paris Salon, as well as for her charitable work, which included the establishment of soup kitchens for the poor of Lisbon.
Early years
Maria Luísa Domingas Eugénia Ana Filomena Josefa Antónia Francisca Xavier Sales de Borja de Assis and Paula de Sousa Holstein was born on 4 August 1841, in Lisbon, in the Palace of the Dukes of Palmela. She had blonde hair and blue eyes, presumably inherited from Maria Anna Leopoldina von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Beck, the grandmother of the first Duke of Palmela. She attended a school in France, where the daughters of the European aristocracy received a religious education taught by nuns, but also had classes in fine arts, and visits to museums, monuments and concerts.
In what was the Lisbon society wedding of the year, in April 1863 she married D. António de Sampaio e Pina de Brederode, the second son of the Viscount of Lançada, who was a soldier who had volunteered for the British army and fought in the Crimean War (1853–56). On the death of her father in 1864 three years after her mother's death, she became the Duchess of Palmela and her husband became the 3rd Duke. At the age of 24, the new Duchess was in control not only of a vast fortune but also an artistic heritage consisting of the family's many properties and the numerous works of art they contained.
Artistic work
Appreciated as a sculptor, she was also a significant patron of the arts, both by awarding scholarships and financial grants and by commissioning and buying works of art to modernize the already notable Palmela collection. She started her artistic career soon after the birth of her two children, D. Helena Maria Domingas in 1864, and D. Pedro Maria Luís Eugénio in 1866. Important initial influences were Victor Bastos of Portugal’s Academy of Fine Arts in Lisbon, which had been founded in 1836, and the Frenchman, , an artist of the Romantic school who had arrived in Lisbon in 1858. Calmels painted and sculpted the Palmela family and in 1865 and 1866 worked with the Duchess on the redesign of the late-18th-century Palmela palace in Lisbon, continuing to provide works of art for the palace until the turn of the century. He was also responsible for the decoration of a summer house that the Duke and Duchess built in Cascais at the time when the royal family were spending part of their summers there.
De Sousa Holstein's artistic training was not just restricted to formal lessons by Bastos and Calmels. Affluent, cosmopolitan, and enlightened, she surrounded herself with some of the most respected artists of the time. She was a friend of the actresses Sarah Bernhardt, who visited Lisbon in 1895, and Eleonora Duse. In the field of sculpture, she worked in Paris with Auguste Rodin and Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume. Guillaume sculpted a bust of her in 1889.
With a favourable reception at her first two showings in Lisbon, the Duchess exhibited at the 1878 Exposition Universelle (1878) in Paris, possibly using her connections to secure a place. Exhibiting at the annual exhibitions of the "Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts" (Sociedade Promotora das Belas-artes-SPBA) as well as at smaller exhibitions of paintings often held in Lisbon's bookshops, she continued to gain favourable comment for her sculptures and watercolours. The writer Ramalho Ortigão said that she was "no longer a simple amateur, a dilettante, but an artist in the most beautiful sense of the word", and the journalist Rangel de Lima noted that "the art of sculpture in Portugal can, therefore, be exalted for having among its cultivators such a noble and distinguished amateur in the works to which she connects her name". Her first presentation at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français in Paris was in 1884, where her sculpture of Diogenes was very favourably received. It became sufficiently popular to be subsequently reproduced in smaller versions in brass.