Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768-1848), court painter to Napoleon who accompanied the French Artistic Mission to Brazil in 1816 and spent 15 years documenting Brazilian society under the Portuguese crown. His monumental Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil (1834-1839) is the preeminent visual document of slavery in Brazil: slave markets, corporal punishments, life in the sugar mills and in the cities, and human types of Brazilian racial diversity. An uncomfortable and irreplaceable testimony of 19th-century Brazil that Debret observed with a mixture of fascination, distance, and pity characteristic of the European ilustrado.