Modesto Brocos was a Galician artist who was active in Brazil and obtained Brazilian nationality. He studied at the Academia de Bellas Artes de La Coruña and later at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro. He also studied in Paris, Madrid, and Rome. Brocos was a painter of portraits, landscapes, and genre themes, an engraver, draughtsman, and writer.

He popularized the technique of woodcut in Brazil and produced innumerable etched portraits and paintings of Brazilian genre and historical subjects. He published writings on art theory and produced his only work of fiction, "Journey to Mars". He returned to Brazil in 1890 and obtained a teaching post at the National School of Fine Arts, of which he eventually became ...