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Pedro stands in the stirrups with his sword up, and the men beside him lift their hats. Américo took the cut of that uniform from a print made before 1822.

Brazil's independence runs backward compared to everyone else's: the empire moved to the colony first. The Portuguese court ran from Napoleon in 1807, some 15,000 people with the treasury, the archives and the royal library. They crossed the Atlantic and made Rio de Janeiro the capital of a European empire, the only time that has happened. When the king finally sailed home in 1821, he left his heir Pedro behind as regent. Lisbon's parliament then set about pushing Brazil back into being a colony: courts closed, powers revoked, the prince ordered home like a schoolboy. Pedro's first refusal, in January 1822, is remembered by a single word: fico, I am staying. The break arrived by courier on 7 September 1822, beside the Ipiranga, a brook outside São Paulo. Pedro was 23, riding back from an inspection trip, and by every account in agony with a stomach complaint. He opened dispatches that cut his regency down to nothing. With them came letters from his wife Leopoldina and his minister José Bonifácio, telling him the moment had come. He read them by the roadside, drew his sword, and gave the shout the schoolbooks keep: independence or death. He was crowned emperor on 1 December that year, at 24. Brazil kept his family on the throne for 67 years, and kept slavery for 66 of them. The painting of the shout was made 66 years later, on the other side of the Atlantic. Pedro Américo offered to do it himself, signed the contract in 1886, and painted it in Florence for the museum going up on the hill at Ipiranga. In his canvas the muddy trail is a parade ground and the road-worn escort is dress-uniform cavalry. Critics at home said the whole scene came out of Meissonier. Américo had published a pamphlet on plagiarism in art back in 1879. The one concession to the actual road is in the left corner, where a barefoot ox driver with his cart watches the founding of his country, dressed for the Brazil that existed. Brazil did not see the canvas until 7 September 1895, when the museum opened. It hangs in the Museu do Ipiranga still, on the hill above the brook, the national image reproduced on every schoolroom wall. The drover usually gets cropped.