But it is true that the rigid aesthetic principles sustained by the Imperial Academy and its close dependence on government approval did not allow an expression of either the poetic act that defined for the European Romantics the independent and original artistic creation, or of a contesting and revolutionary spirit, another mark of the passionate and even violent Romanticism of the first two international Romantic generations. However, one should not credit only to official impositions the much more restrained and, in the words of some, conventional tone that Brazilian pictorial Romanticism assumed, because, as already mentioned, the great delay in relation to Europe with which it began in Brazil made it assimilate the influence not so much of its first impetus, but of the declining phase of this current, typified by French Pompier art, which is essentially bourgeois, conformist, eclectic and sentimental.
