Emmanuel Zamor 1840-1919

Manuel Pierre Hubert Zamore, known as Emmanuel Zamor (1840–1919), was a French painter and songwriter of Brazilian origin who made his career in France.

Born on 19 May 1840 in Salvador, Bahia, he was an abandoned child taken in by the parish of the Basílica Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Praia de Salvador. In 1845, he was adopted by a French couple, Pierre Emmanuel Zamore and Rose Neveu, and taken to Paris. He studied music and drawing, and around 1858, he attended the Académie Julian, adopting the artist name “Emmanuel Zamor” and earning the nickname “the Little Brazilian.” In 1860, he returned to Salvador, where most of his paintings were lost in a fire. In 1868, he returned to Paris to attend his adoptive father’s funeral and never left France afterward.

In 1870, on the advice of Nicolas Berthon, he debuted at the Paris Salon, presenting a painting titled Corbeau s’abattant sur une tête de mort (Crow Descending on a Skull); his Paris address was listed as 94 rue Amelot. He later exhibited at the Salon des artistes français in 1880, 1884, 1887, and 1897. In addition to Berthon, he cited Henri Guilmard (1849–?) as a teacher. His later works depict landscapes around Champigny-sur-Marne and Créteil.

From 1869 onward, Zamor also appeared as a composer and lyricist, producing a repertoire of 205 songs. In August 1891, residing at 15 rue Saint-Gilles, he founded and presided over the lyrical and dramatic songwriters’ society Les Modernistes, inaugurated with a concert at the Globe on Boulevard de Strasbourg; activities continued for several months at the Hôtel Moderne on Place de la République. As a lyricist, his name is associated with a series of songs produced between 1907 and 1915 with his son Antoni Manuel, known as “Harry Zamore,” a pianist born in 1881. His first wife, Olympe Léontine Lecornu, was a graduate of the Conservatoire and a pianist; she died in 1882.

He married a second time to Eugénie Kollmann (d. 1916), a milliner, and settled in Créteil, where he died on 6 March 1919 in his home on Quai du Halage.

In 1984, 37 of his rediscovered paintings were sold at Christie's Paris by Jean-Claude Castoriano and donated to the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, leading to exhibitions.

Paintings and drawings by Zamor are held in Brazil by the Museu Afro Brasil, the São Paulo Museum of Art, and the Museu de Arte Brasileira da Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in São Paulo. The Bibliothèque nationale de France holds a large collection of his printed musical scores.