Life.Culture.Discovery.

Then & NowPortuguese artist in Hong Kong Alfonso Barretto, who honed his craft as a prisoner of war, is overdue a major retrospective

Alfonso Barretto owed his successful post-1945 painting career to drawing classes in a Hong Kong prisoner-of-war camp, where he sketched Japanese guards

Born into a prominent Hong Kong Portuguese family, he knew, and painted, everyone from New Territories farmers to public figures until his death aged 50

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Painter Alfonso Barretto at his easel with two of his sisters, Mrs Tilly D’Almada e Castro (left) and Mrs Olive Basto, at Girassol, the house he built with his wife, Gloria, in Tai Po Kau, in Hong Kong’s New Territories. Photo: courtesy of D’Almada Barretto Collection

Published: 9:45am, 16 Aug 2022Updated: 10:16am, 16 Aug 2022

Artistic careers begin in unlikely places. Prisoner-of-war and civilian internee camps across Japanese-occupied Asia experienced – in tandem with deprivation and hardship – an extraordinarily rich cultural life that remains largely overlooked. From highly diverse pre-war backgrounds, thousands of people were suddenly thrown together into prolonged captivity, with little available distraction beyond routine chores.

Crushing boredom – as dangerous to morale as incarceration – was partially alleviated by a vast array of lectures and interest classes; anyone with knowledge to share was keenly embraced.

From a prominent local family with long-established links to India, Macau and the Philippines, Alfonso Octavio Barretto was born in Hong Kong in 1913, educated at St Joseph’s College, and served in the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps during the Battle of Hong Kong in December 1941.

Art classes as a prisoner of war in the Sham Shui Po POW camp subsequently led to a successful post-war painting career, initially “with watercolour, but found that I was too heavy-handed – oil was my medium”. Nearly 60 years after his death, Barretto remains Hong Kong’s only significant local Portuguese artist.

People of many nationalities sit to Mr Barretto. But it is with the Chinese that [he] appears most at home and [is] most at home

From a 1957 interview with Alfonso Barretto

In a 1957 newspaper interview, just before a major public exhibition of his work at Club Lusitano in Central district, Barretto expanded upon this wartime artistic genesis. “I used to while away my time during POW days with drawing – oils and brushes then weren’t available. And I sold my first works to the Japanese […]

“At the risk of being severely punished they would come, and under the glare of torches I would sketch them for a price – packets of cigarettes, soap and things.”