João Maria Correia Ayres de Campos, 1st Count of Ameal (Coimbra, February 5, 1847–July 13, 1920) was a Portuguese politician, art collector, maecenas and humanist, renowned chiefly for having assembled one of Portugal's largest and most important private art collections, as well as what was at the time the largest private library in the country. His collection is also famous for having been auctioned en masse after his death in 1920, leading to the largest auction recorded in the Iberian peninsula and one of the largest in Europe at the time. Several pieces formerly belonging to him have later been incorporated into the collections of the Louvre, the Prado and the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon.
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João Maria Correia Ayres de Campos was born in Coimbra to João Correia Ayres de Campos, a renowned lawyer and amateur archeologist from a family of the lower nobility, and his wife Leonor de Sá Correia. As a young man, he studied Law at the University of Coimbra, graduating in 1868, and joined the Partido Regenerador, a conservative political party opposed to the Partido Progressista during the Liberal Monarchy. In 1876, João married Maria Amélia de Sande Mexia Vieira da Mota, Countess of Juncal. They had four children:
Rising to prominence within the local chapter of the Partido Regenerador, João Maria Correia Ayres de Campos was elected mayor of his hometown of Coimbra in 1886, and later appointed deputy at the Portuguese National Parliament.
He was created Count of Ameal by king Charles I of Portugal in 1901, upon his retirement from active political life. To embellish his coat-of-arms he chose the motto Ars Super Omnia (Art Above All Things).
A wealthy land-owner whose property had substantially increased in value due to the city's quick urban expansion, João Maria Correia Ayres de Campos began to amass his large collection in the 1880s. Having bought the 15th-century buildings of the former monastery and college of S. Tomás, in Coimbra, he transformed them into a large palace of neoclassical design. The Count then filled its rooms (most of which still retained their original gothic form in spite of the building's external neoclassical appearance) with precious furniture, Old Master paintings and about 30.000 rare books.
Among his collection of painting, there was one canvas by Caravaggio (Saint John the Baptist), one large drawing by Rembrandt (Head of a Man), a large Glorification of the Virgin by Rubens, a Portrait of a Man by Philippe de Champagne and two portraits of saints by Zurbarán. The collection further contained two canvases by Murillo, three by Greuze, four by Ribera and one canvas and four aquatints by Goya, as well as a large collection of watercolors by Turner and Delacroix.
The collection also comprised a considerable selection of oil paintings and drawings by Salvator Rosa, an artist then virtually unknown in Portugal but one of the Count's favourite painters.
An admirer of contemporary Portuguese painters, particularly of the Realist school that was then at the height of its popularity, the Count of Ameal also owned a large selection of canvases and drawings by José Malhoa, Columbano and António Silva Porto. Of the latter, he possessed the famous The Boy and His Sheep, now in the Soares dos Reis Museum in Porto.
Towards the end of his life, the Count came to assemble a large collection of gothic sculptutre and painting, as well as one of late-medieval and early-modern Portuguese religious painting (the latter chiefly purchased after the suppression of the property of the religious orders by the Republicans in 1910).
Another important part of the Count's collection was his selection of Islamic faience, mostly Iberian and late-medieval.
Upon the Count's death in 1920, his deeply-religious widow decided to sell most of the collection - probably because the family was starting to struggle with financial difficulties due to some of the Count's last and more costly purchases - as well as to donate the palace that housed it to a religious order. For that purpose, a major auction was hastily organized in July 1921, the biggest event of the kind in the history of auctioneering in Portugal. Both the British Museum and the Louvre sent emissaries to the event, the latter having acquired a large amount of porcelain and most of the Count's collection of Islamic faience.
The 1st Count of Ameal died in Coimbra in 1920, aged 74. He had designed for himself, his wife and his descendants an exquisite octagonal gothic pantheon in Coimbra's cemetery of Conchada, which had been completed in 1899. The 10-meter-tall monument, comprising a relatively small funeral chapel at ground level and a crypt with six floors beneath, has been considered one of the masterpieces of Portuguese gothic revival. Bearing a number of allusions to Dante's Divine Comedy, the structure is adorned with eagles, griffins and lillies, its spire being topped by an over-lifesize statue of Beatrice.
It is possible that the building also contains an esoteric meaning, its crypts being arranged around a spiral stairwell reminiscent of the so called pit of initiation at the contemporary Regaleira estate, in Sintra. The works on this monument were led by sculptor Costa Mota Tio, who had been responsible for the revivalist reconstruction of the eastern wing of the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon.
The pantheon is still in use by the Count's descendants today.