No one has described the Portugese family as it lived in colonial Brazil better than Debret. He portrays a family of a certain category going out for a walk. The father, with his somewhat Napoleonic, bicorn hat goes in front, a patriarch lost in the mists. Behind him, single file, comes the entire family. And finally, this is really the non-apartheid Portuguese, come the black servants, who are also going out for a walk. The black ladies come out with a kind of turban on their head, and with a child on either side.
Jean Baptiste Debret
Something that is really lacking is manorial society, made up of the family plus the servants that work in the family household (…) It amounts to a true adoption diminutae rationis within the family.
