Maria Cecilia and Paulo Geyer spent decades collecting the more than four thousand objects that make up the Geyer Collection. In 1999, the couple donated their collection and the majestic house in which it was housed – in the Cosme Velho neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro – to the Imperial Museum. That exemplary gesture of selflessness and public spirit deserves to be remembered and celebrated. This room aims to salute the spirit of the benefactors as well as to evoke the atmosphere of the house where they lived for so many years, welcoming friends and building networks of empathy and knowledge.

The highest purpose of the collector is to gather fragments scattered over time and endow them with new meaning, creating a larger whole that is a work in itself. It is our task, as their inheritors, to decipher the riddles proposed by the keen intuition of the Geyer couple in piecing together their splendid collection. The attempt to look at the objects exhibited here through the eyes of those who collected them is not only a rightful tribute but also an exercise in learning to see them with the passion and intelligence of those who recovered them from oblivion. The education of our gaze through an understanding the gazes that preceded us is essential to building a common culture.