Born on Rua da Fábrica in the Porto parish of Vitória on 17 April, José de Freitas Bragança was the third child of António Manuel Rodrigues and Albertina Mendes de Freitas. They were a humble family and subsisted off the father’s work as a tailor. Presumably, the family’s origins in the city of Bragança were the motivation behind the household’s subsequent adoption of that as a new surname.

In 1910, after completing primary and secondary school in Porto, José de Bragança went to Paris to continue his studies at the Sorbonne, where he performed various jobs to pay for his higher education. Graduating with a degree in Modern Philology, the outbreak of World War I did not spur his departure from the French capital, where he went on to teach at the prominent Collège Sainte-Barbe, with ancestral ties to the Portuguese humanists, and also took on the position of director of the Portuguese division at the Casa Editorial Hispano-Americana. His debut as writer, translator and art critic dates from this period, with his drafting of articles on painters and musicians, as well as a journalist with collaborations in periodicals such as La Revue de France, L’Illustration, Les Gil Blas, Les Temps and Portugal na Guerra from the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps.

Returning to Portugal in the beginning of 1922, he was hired as an assistant of Romance Philology at the First Faculty of Arts of Porto in June of the following year after an invitation from Hernâni Cidade, however is university career would be short-lived. In 1925 he accepted an offer for a role at the office of Ministry of Labour, but upon returning to the University in October he learned that his contract would not be renewed by the Faculty Education Committee, which earned him felt criticism for the little academic and personal consideration that would have been voted. As result, he decided to establish residence in Lisbon and embarked on a new career as a journalist and historian, particularly in the field of Art History, specializing in the critique and study of portraiture in Renaissance art.

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