Traveler Artists: Landscapes of Latin America From the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection

traveler artists

Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection

Edited by Katherine Manthorne

Copyright © 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Traveler artists : landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection / Katherine Manthorne, editor.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-9840173-2-4 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-9823544-1-4 (softcover)

1. Latin America—In art. 2. Landscapes in art. 3. Nature in art.

4. Artists—Travel—Latin America. 5. Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. I. Manthorne, Katherine, editor. II. Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, issuing body.

N8214.5.L29T73 2015 700ˇ.46098—dc23

Front cover: Detail from Alessandro Ciccarelli ’s View of Rio de Janeiro; see page 110

Back cover: Detail from Ferdinand Bellermann’s At the Sugar Mill; see page 211

Title page: Detail from Ferdinand Bellermann’s Urao Lagoon; see pages 144–145

Produced by Marquand Books, Inc., Seattle www.marquand.com

Editor: Katherine Manthorne

Managing editors: Ileen Kohn, Sara Meadows, Donna Wingate

Photographers: Rodrigo Benavides, Christopher Burke Studio/Shoot Art, Julio Grinblatt, Mark Morosse, Frank Raux, Carlos German Rojas, Gregg Stanger

Copyeditor: Martin Fox

Translators: Cristina Labarca, Phillip Penix-Tadsen

Designer: Jef Wincapaw

Proofread by Ted Gilley and Carrie Cooperider

Typeset in Chronicle by Tina Henderson

Indexed by Candace Hyatt

Color management by iocolor, Seattle

Printed and bound in China by Artron Art Group

intro

Acknowledgments

Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro

Preface

Katherine Manthorne

The View from Here

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Foreword, Americas Society

Susan L. Segal

Foreword, Hunter College

Jennifer J. Raab essays

The Latin American Landscape in a Global Context

Katherine Manthorne

The Traveler Artist: The Construction of Landscape, the Picturesque, and the Sublime

Pablo Diener

Landscape and Foundation: Frans Post and the Invention of the American Landscape

Luis Pérez-Oramas

Frans Post in the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection

Rafael Romero D.

geography

Valley of Mexico

Caracas and Environs

Caribbean and Central America

Ports and Seascapes

The Andes man an D nature

Botanicals Ruins Figures in the Landscape expe D itions

Robert H. Schomburgk Auguste Morisot

acknowledgments

Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro Director and Chief Curator, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

The Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) has been fortunate to have the collaborative assistance of outstanding individuals and institutions in the many steps leading to the publication of Traveler Artists: Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection. We would like to acknowledge here the help and guidance of the partners who made this book possible, and ofer our deep appreciation for their crucial contributions.

At Marquand Books, Ed Marquand, Adrian Lucia, and Jef Wincapaw were the guiding lights for the book’s design and production, along with Donna Wingate, whose keen eye was an important asset.

Americas Society and Hunter College were vital partners in this project, which included the planning of an exhibition of works by traveler artists in Latin America called “Boundless Reality: Traveler Artists’ Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection.” It was shown simultaneously at Americas Society, and at Hunter in the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery. At Americas Society, we are grateful to its President and CEO, Susan Segal, for seeing the project’s potential, and to its visual arts curator Gabriela Rangel and assistant curator, Cristina de León, for their enthusiastic support and thoughtful contributions. At Hunter’s Leubsdorf Gallery, Curator Sarah Watson generously made the gallery available and ably coordinated all aspects of the exhibition. She was assisted by Annie Wischmeyer, and by the gallery’s preparator, Phi Nguyen. Our thanks also to Howard Singerman, Executive Director of the Leubsdorf Gallery and Chair of the Hunter College Department of Art; to Jocelyn Spaar, his assistant; and to Joachim Pissarro, Hunter’s Bershad Professor of Art History and Director. Our student contributors to this book were an important part of the curatorial process for the exhibition, and worked diligently to conduct original research and to write short texts describing the art, art-

ists, and environments that fgure in the CPPC’s collection of traveler art. Both their seriousness of purpose and evident joy in their tasks were inspirational. From Hunter, working with Professor Harper Montgomery, our student contributors were: Silvia Benedetti, Sarah Connors, Agnieszka Anna Ficek, Ellen Glass Birger, Alana Hernandez, Paula Kupfer, Elizabeth Lewin, Stephanie Lish, Alex C. Maccaro, Claire Pauley McPherson, and Javier Rivero. Sara Meadows, of the CPPC, audited Dr. Montgomery’s class and also contributed to the texts. Their colleagues from the Graduate Center, CUNY, working with Professor Katherine Manthorne, were: Theodore Barrow, Adrianna Campbell, Caroline Gillaspie, Bree Lehman, Erika Nelson, Alison Petretti, Danielle Stewart, and Alice J. Walkiewicz. We thank them all for a job well done.

Our senior contributors set an example of excellence for those students, and we are very fortunate to be able to include texts by the following scholars, each of whom lent their distinctive point of view and special expertise to the book’s content: Roberto Amigo, Rafael Castillo Zapata, Pablo Diener, Roldán Esteva-Grillet, Georgia de Havenon, Alicia Lubowski-Jahn, Luis Pérez-Oramas, Katherine Manthorne, Harper Montgomery, and Rafael Romero D.

Thomas von Taschitzki generously shared his recent research on Ferdinand Bellermann with Rafael Romero D., and the artist’s great-grandson, Peter Bellermann, kindly allowed access to his personal archive. Juan Ignacio Parra opened his personal library of rare books for Dr. Romero to consult, and Rafael Santana gave him much-appreciated technical support in gathering images.

The infuences of both Harper Montgomery and Katherine Manthorne are happily evident throughout this book, and Katherine Manthorne took on the demanding role of the publication’s editor. For that, we owe her a particular debt of gratitude; her scholarship and eye made this volume a fulfllment of our dreams. Finally, although Jay Levenson’s name does not appear anywhere in these pages as an author, he wrote the conceptual permission slip for us to go ahead, and for his encouragement and belief in the project, we are all indebted.

preface

Katherine Manthorne, Editor Professor, Doctoral Program in Art History Graduate Center, City University of New York

South and Central America possess an unprecedented range of scenery, embracing all manner of landforms and climate zones, from the Andes to the Amazon and from the lushness of the Caribbean to the desolation of Tierra del Fuego. Alexander von Humboldt’s explorations (1799–1804) and subsequent writings about equatorial South America inspired native artists and those from across Europe and the United States, who produced a range of visual documents as varied as the terrain itself. Yet it remains a remarkable fact that until now we had no dedicated study of Latin American landscape art. History as well as geography worked against the production of such a narrative. The nineteenth century still remains something of a lacuna in the study of art produced in the countries stretching from Mexico to the Southern Cone. The scholarship in this feld has traditionally had dual epicenters: modern/contemporary and pre-Columbian/colonial. The assumptions have prevailed that in Spanish America the period of the Wars of Independence and their immediate aftermath was too troubled to foster artistic production, and too chaotic to preserve records of the scattered eforts that had been made. Brazil’s distinct history, with its ties to Portugal, further complicated matters. Then, too, Latin America was thought to possess an impossible reality, one that simply could not be made to conform to European artistic conventions. For all of these reasons its landscape art has been largely unexamined. The history of art teaches us that quality prevails, and that major works of art are prized even when their makers go unrecognized. This was true of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, whose name was little known for centuries but whose oeuvre achieved increasing appreciation until his reputation was resuscitated. It is also the case with artists in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), most notably José María Velasco. When he was at the start of

his career the art world paid little heed to any Latin American artist, and yet his masterful canvases of the Valley of Mexico won international recognition beginning with the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. Or consider the circumstances of Camille Pissarro, who became a key fgure in French art of the late nineteenth century as a member of the Impressionists and a longtime friend and collaborator of Paul Cézanne’s. Yet seldom are Pissarro’s Caribbean origins (he was born on Saint Thomas) or his debt to his frst teacher, Danish traveler artist Fritz Melbye, acknowledged. Here his early pictures take on new meaning when examined in the Latin American context. Over time the CPPC has grown to embrace many artists whose names are as yet unfamiliar, but whose pictures stand on par with already established fgures. German painter Ferdinand Bellermann’s residence in Venezuela resulted in Guácharo Cave, which can now take its place among the great historic landscapes of the era. Knowledge of Louisiana resident Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s paintings of Yucatan adds another chapter to the delineation of Mayan ruins. English Emigrants Disembarking from the Steamship Cisne at Asunción by a yet unidentifed artist provides a rare glimpse into the experience of those who crossed the Atlantic to make a new life in Paraguay. The botanical drawings of Albert Berg rank with some of the fnest renderings of trees and vegetation produced on the continent. A view of Lima and the Port of Callao documents the appearance of the architecture and extensive metropolitan center of this busy Pacifc port. These are just a few of the important discoveries made during the process of locating and researching these works. These discoveries were made in part by doctoral students in my seminars at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The CPPC generously made their artworks available to us, and arranged for students to study them frsthand. Our work began with a course on the Latin American landscape, 1870 to 1970, in which the preliminary segment was dedicated to the nineteenth-century material. Then the pace of investigation accelerated so that by spring 2012, I ofered a dedicated seminar on traveler artists in the CPPC in which students interrogated these works from a variety of perspectives: the relation of art to the literature of travel and exploration; the rise of tourism; colonial versus postcolonial encounters; imprint of foreign travelers on the host country; and Latin America’s role in global and hemispheric artistic dialogue. Former CPPC Director Rafael Romero D. was a guest lecturer, and helped mentor the students’ work. This next generation of pan-Americanists included Theodore Barrow, Andrianna

Campbell, Caroline Gillaspie, Bree Lehman, Erika Nelson, Alison Petretti, Danielle Stewart, and Alice J. Walkiewicz, who continued to research the artworks over time and refned their texts for publication. They are complemented by the work of Hunter College MA students led by Harper Montgomery, the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Professor in Latin American Art.

As with my students at the Graduate Center, CUNY, the Hunter students were given the opportunity to study works of art from the CPPC frsthand, and were also treated to a lecture by Rafael Romero D. Professor Montgomery’s class experienced the curatorial process, participating in creating the rationale for an exhibition and choosing the works. They also researched and wrote object entries for this volume, discovering as they did so the ways in which history is revealed and contextualized by visual art, and how the operations of gaze and counter-gaze of artists from within and without the regions they documented informed their vision. The corollary exhibition, held at Americas Society and the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery at Hunter College, necessarily comprised fewer works than can be seen in these pages. The creation of this more inclusive volume allowed all of our students an expanded view of both the CPPC’s collection and the varied contributions of traveler artists to our knowledge of Latin American landscape painting.

A word is needed about the organization of the book. My introductory text aims to position these renderings of Latin America in an art historical context. Pablo Diener’s essay probes the philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of this burgeoning tradition. Since the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Frans Post was seminal to all that followed, Luis Pérez-Oramas discusses Post and the “invention” of the Latin American tradition, and Rafael Romero D. examines the specifc works by Post in the CPPC. Following these essays are in-depth entries on the nineteenth-century artworks that present new information and interpretations. Surveying these pictures, we began to see that they did not ft neatly into the standard scheme of national schools. Given the large international contingent of artists and the range of territory they covered, an alternative organization was required. Lively group discussions led us to recognize that many artists focused on geography, which clustered around particular regions. The initial group focuses on the Valley of Mexico, whose sacred space provides a touchstone for Latin American landscape studies, followed by Caracas, and then the Caribbean and Central America. A section on ports and seascapes provides a counterpoint to the majority of images of terra frma. This

segment concludes with the Andes, which inspired some of the bestknown, canonical images. The other critical theme to emerge is the relationship of humanity and nature, which manifests itself in a variety of ways in these landscapes. First there is the close observation of fora and fauna, evident in the botanical studies. Also appearing is the delineation of pre-Columbian ruins, reference to civilizations previously inhabiting the region, and then the diverse appearance of fgures in the landscape. The section that follows provides an in-depth look at two expeditions: those of Robert Schomburgk, who in the 1830s and 1840s made successive expeditions to the interior of Guiana on behalf of the Royal Geographic Society, London; and French naturalist Jean Chafanjon’s second excursion to the Orinoco (1886–87), when the artist Auguste Morisot accompanied him.

Artists represented in the CPPC crossed territorial frontiers and the boundary lines between civilization and wilderness to pursue their pictorial subjects. Students and scholars whose texts are presented in this volume navigated their paths through a feld of study not yet comprehensively mapped and began to chart this new frontier of knowledge. Just as landscape holds the key to culture, so these pictures provide a window onto nineteenth-century attitudes toward nature and art.

With this volume, we honor Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, who pursued her dream and made this collection a reality. This book is a tribute to her vision.

The scope of the CPPC and the depth of research ofered here put this fedging feld on a stronger foundational footing, to be built upon for generations to come. It represents the beginning of our shared journey.

the view from here

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Here’s a conundrum: what do you call a collection of landscapes that spans three centuries, depicts the broad territories of Latin America and the Caribbean—on land and at sea—and was created by artists, both domestic and foreign, professional and amateur, who pursued the sometimes contradictory notions of science, the state, or the sublime?

There simply is no one point of view that lends itself to an easy, all-encompassing label, but that, for my husband Gustavo Cisneros and me, is the attraction of this collection: it is an aggregate of truths that together tells a much more complete story than any of its individual components could reveal alone.

The Traveler Artist collection, as we determined to name it, of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), began in 1997. At that time, my husband, Gustavo, proposed the acquisition of a painting by Frans Post of a view of the Brazilian city of Frederica in Paraíba, created from a trip the artist made to the region in 1637. We were fascinated by the painting’s atmospheric depiction of Brazil’s beauty, the attentiveness with which Post had rendered its native vegetation, and the expansiveness of the land seen hazily in the distance. The Post painting was an apt starting point for the collection, too, because it was he who inaugurated the “traveler artist” tradition in Latin America.

Other landscapes soon drew our attention, and through the years— with crucial advice from Paulo Herkenhof, Luis Pérez- Oramas, and the Director (now Director Emeritus) of the CPPC, Rafael Romero D., as well as the CPPC’s current Director, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro—the collection grew to include landscapes from the early Post years through the end of the nineteenth century. Gustavo and I were enchanted with the idea that the complexity of Latin America and the Caribbean could be shown through the eyes of a group of artists, scientists, and envoys who had traveled throughout the countries of those areas and recorded their experiences.

There’s an interesting correspondence between the traveler artist landscape collection and that of the CPPC’s holdings of modernist geometric abstraction—the collection for which it is perhaps best known— and the borders between the two are more permeable than it might appear at frst glance. For one thing, all of the above-mentioned curators, whose insights and consultations have been so valuable in formulating both the modernist and landscape components of the collection, are, in terms of their primary areas of scholarship, modernists. It was therefore not difcult for them to perceive, for example, that the qualities of Venezuelan light that had captivated Ferdinand Bellermann and Anton Goering were the same that, centuries later, fascinated Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jésus Soto, and Armando Reverón. In this way, the School of Caracas may be said to be a bridge between the later artworks, providing us with a means of exchange between them. Another important commonality that the two collections share is their transnationalism, and this focus is something that I credit Gustavo for identifying and making a priority in all aspects of our lives together. That will to traverse borders in search of knowledge, adventure, and new horizons was just as present in the many modern artists who emigrated to Latin America and the Caribbean in the twentieth century as in their historical counterparts.

Although many of the artists whose works are discussed in this volume did travel great distances to record, frsthand, the landscapes and people they encountered, others were from the regions depicted, and did not need to venture far from their homes. A signifcant number of artists elaborated on their plein air sketches—sometimes fancifully—upon return to their studios in Europe or the United States. And engravers who had only secondhand knowledge of the places depicted in others’ paintings created printed images that could be widely distributed.

Despite this diversity of approach and diference in actual distance traversed, the term “traveler artist” seemed generous enough to encompass all of these. After all, a journey may also be undertaken on a metaphoric level, utilizing the same habits of observation, memory, and reverie that the physical traveler employs. The Argentine writer César Aira’s novel Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero [An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter], published in 2000, bears this out: in it, Aira recounts a fctional episode in a journey by the nineteenthcentury traveler artist Johann Moritz Rugendas. In this short work, fction’s discursive possibilities create an intensity and immediacy

greater than an archival account could have done, in the same way that a cycloramic view created from fat paintings must have given those who stood in its center a sense not merely of taking in a view, but of being taken into it. Distance and proximity are interior operations of the imagination as well as exterior measures of space.

The categories of travel, then, and the modes of journey, are fexible, and one of the joys of a collection is that one’s perspective of it shifts according to how it is contextualized. It was an extreme pleasure to work with students and professors at Hunter College and CUNY’s Graduate Center to realize this view of the collection, with a catalogue (and a related, though independent, exhibition shown at Hunter’s Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery and Americas Society in New York) comprising a wide range of works from the Traveler Artist collection. To have their fresh insights is an incomparable privilege. We thank all of the students from Hunter and CUNY for their enthusiasm, research, and diligence: it shows in the wonderful catalogue entries they have created as part of their coursework.

To their professors, Dr. Katherine Manthorne at CUNY and Dr. Harper Montgomery at Hunter, Gustavo and I owe a particular debt of gratitude for inspiring their students, as they inspire us, with their profound scholarship and dedication. Professor Manthorne did a superb job of editing the catalogue. In fact, the catalogue had been “ her baby” as much as ours for several years now, evolving as we acquired new works to complement the collection. Professor Manthorne’s guidance was crucial to the project, and her erudite essay in the catalogue outlining the history of landscape painting in the era of the traveler artist is exemplary. Professor Montgomery, in addition to guiding her students’ research and developing the excellent curatorial practicum for the exhibition, also contributed a number of object entries for the catalogue. Others lent their expertise as well: we deeply appreciate Pablo Diener’s poetic essay, as well as his cheerful availability as a consultant to the students involved. Luis Pérez-Oramas has graciously contributed a superb essay as well, and the CPPC’s Director Emeritus Rafael Romero D. has been a keen supporter of and key contributor to the project from its inception. As always, we are grateful to the CPPC’s Director, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, and our staf at the CPPC, who continue to amaze me. In particular, Ileen Kohn, Sara Meadows, and Carrie Cooperider all made signifcant contributions to the publication of this catalogue, as did our collaborator Donna Wingate. Gracias a todos!

foreword , americas society

Susan L. Segal President and CEO, Americas Society

Americas Society is proud to have partnered with the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Hunter College on the landmark exhibition “Boundless Reality: Traveler Artists’ Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection.” The exhibition, a corollary project of the catalogue you see here, includes an extraordinary selection of works by artists from Europe and the United States, as well as a select group of artists from the region—including José María Velasco, Marc Ferrez, and Camille Pissarro—who provide an important balance to the travelers’ depictions of Latin America.

The exhibition in the gallery of Americas Society is centered around the 1886 expedition of Jean Chafanjon, accompanied by artist Auguste Morisot, to Venezuela. In that year, the two arrived in Caracas while traveling to the southeastern region of Venezuela, where they believed they would discover the source of the Orinoco River. After nine months, and despite the difculties encountered during the journey, the expedition proved tremendously valuable for the two French countrymen in their quest to explore tropical fora and fauna through the use of scientifc-aesthetic methodologies. In particular, Morisot’s exposure to the landscape of the Orinoquian rain forest and his encounters with its people shaped the curiosity and imagination behind the unique archive of his drawings, sketches, photographs, and watercolors, as well as a diary that, after a century, was recovered through the vision of collector and philanthropist Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.

Throughout its ffty years, Americas Society has remained committed to bringing national and global attention to the diverse cultural heritage of the Americas. As an organization, we are honored to deepen our mission with a visual arts project that merges art and science through the scholarship of the Curatorial Practicum: Subjectivity and the Nineteenth Century Latin American Landscape, a Fundación Cisneros-sponsored seminar of Latin American Art at Hunter College.

This incredible exhibition seeks to expand the understanding of Latin American art, and accomplishes the historiographical project advanced by our Visual Arts program in previous exhibitions “Reproducing Nations: Types and Costumes in Asia and Latin America ca. 1800–1860” and “Unity of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas.” The extraordinary collaboration between Dr. Rafael Romero D., Dr. Harper Montgomery, Dr. Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, and Sara Watson, together with our Visual Arts Director and Chief Curator Gabriela Rangel and Assistant Curator Christina De León, has resulted in the creation of a show that embraces the role of nature from an aesthetic, scientifc, and social perspective. Ileen Kohn, Sara Meadows, Prem Krishnamurty, Nuria Mendoza, Silvia Benedetti, Amanda York, and the exceptional talent of the students of the Cisneros Seminar at Hunter College also contributed to ensure the success of this project.

Americas Society extends its immense gratitude to Patricia Phelps de Cisneros for her passion and visionary contribution to Latin American art and culture. A board member of Americas Society since 1986, Mrs. Cisneros’s support, commitment, and leadership has helped shape the organization into what it is today. The longstanding collaboration between the Fundación Cisneros and Americas Society, now in association with Hunter College, merits the celebration of this new cultural venture, which will expose US audiences to Latin America through this exceptional scholarly perspective.

Finally, Americas Society is grateful for the support of public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Afairs, in partnership with the City Council, as well as Jaime and Raquel Gilinski, and the Americas Society Visual Arts Endowment.

foreword , hunter college

Jennifer J. Raab President, Hunter College

On behalf of Hunter College, it is my great pleasure to take this occasion to celebrate our ongoing collaboration with the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and to thank Hunter’s great friends, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Gustavo A. Cisneros for their extraordinary support and commitment to Hunter ’s Department of Art and Art History. This publication and its accompanying exhibition continue a partnership that since 2011 has produced a number of noteworthy shows in Hunter’s galleries that have drawn on the Colección Cisneros and its exceptional strengths in the art of Latin America. These have included “Notations: The Cage Efect Today” and “Jorge Pineda: Shadows and Other Fairy Tales,” both in 2012; “Open Work in Latin America, New York & Beyond: Conceptualism Reconsidered” in 2013; and “Citrus 6909” by Héctor Fuenmayor in 2014. With its signifcant support for a broad program of lectures, seminars, and residencies by a truly special roster of leading Latin American artists and writers, the Fundación Cisneros has deepened Hunter’s focus on Latin American art and expanded the College’s role in increasing local and international understanding of the richness of Latin American art and culture.

For the past three decades, the Hunter College Art Galleries have been central to the teaching and research mission of the Department of Art and Art History. They provide our students with direct experience in the curatorial feld. The object entries that Hunter students have authored for this volume were written, critiqued, and workshopped in a fall 2014 graduate course led by Dr. Harper Montgomery, the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Distinguished Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art. Students studied works in the Colección frsthand, mined archives and libraries to uncover information on little-known artists, wrote texts, and developed the curatorial rationale for a project that contributes vital new knowledge to the growing feld of nineteenth-century images of the Latin American landscape. This is

a wonderful opportunity for our students, and we are deeply appreciative of Mrs. Cisneros’s willingness to share her art and resources with us and with the broader scholarly community and visitors to the galleries of Hunter College and Americas Society.

In addition to my profound thanks to Mrs. Cisneros and the Fundación Cisneros for their exceptionally generous—indeed, transformative—support for programs in Latin American art at Hunter, I would also like to thank Americas Society and its President, Susan Segal, for partnering with Hunter College to present the related exhibition drawn from the Cisneros Traveler Artist Collection. I extend my congratulations to Harper Montgomery and her students for their exceptional work on this beautiful book and the accompanying exhibition, and to Katherine Manthorne of the CUNY Graduate Center for her editorial vision. As always, I am grateful for the leadership of Howard Singerman, the Phyllis and Josef Carof Professor of Fine Arts and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History, and of Joachim Pissarro, the Director of the Hunter College Art Galleries and Bershad Professor of Art History, both of whom have been instrumental in developing Hunter’s partnership with the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and the scholarly and innovative projects that have followed. Hunter is tremendously proud to celebrate the exhibition, and the publication of Traveler Artists: Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection

the latin american landscape in a global conteXt

katherine manthorne

When Frans Post arrived in northeastern Brazil in January 1637 to record the natural scenery of this Dutch colonial outpost, landscape painting was still in its infancy. His countrymen Rembrandt van Rijn and Meindert Hobbema were among the pioneers of the genre, along with Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp, the Italian Salvator Rosa, and two Frenchmen—Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin—working in Rome. Individually they began to forge a rendering of nature, distilled from the backgrounds of religious or allegorical pictures to exist as a distinct artistic genre. Collectively they transformed landscape into a discrete branch of art and established its formal conventions that would serve artists through the nineteenth century.

Unlike his contemporaries, however, Post distinguished himself not with renderings of the low-lying Dutch countryside or the Roman campagna, but as one of the frst trained European landscapists to paint the New World from direct observation. Although his pictures instructed viewers in the distinctive features of the tropical landscape, they did not lead immediately to a school of tropical art. That would have to wait until changes in the geopolitical map rendered the region more accessible to traveler artists. This occurred in the 1820s when the countries of Spanish America one by one threw of the yoke of European rule, and the continent began to open up. Independence coincided with two conditions necessary for the rise of the Latin American landscape: frst, the publications of Alexander von Humboldt on the Andes and of Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius on Brazil, all of which opened up the eyes of the world to the natural riches of these regions; and second, the rise of landscape art across the United States and Europe. Thomas Cole in New York, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot in France, and J. M. W. Turner and John Constable in Great Britain were all responding to a new Romantic impulse toward nature that also fed the taste for the tropical landscape. From the 1820s on, Latin America seduced an array of international artists and challenged their abilities to cast the unique look of its terrain according to the conventions of Western art. Often they succeeded by producing pictures that pushed the limits of that tradition and thrilled audiences with the sense of vicarious travel.

The Challenge of Latin American Reality

Regardless of the motivations of travelers to Latin America, they almost universally shared the same reaction upon their arrival: they felt wonder at all they beheld, and inadequate to convey it. For the early

explorers Columbus, Pizarro, and Cortés, the New World shimmered like a mirage on the horizon: wondrous but unbelievable. Even the road-weary soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the chronicler of Cortés’s march into Mexico, responded with bewilderment: “With such wonderful sights to gaze on we did not know what to say, or if this was real that we saw before our eyes.”1

Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez acknowledged the ongoing dilemma in the late twentieth century: “One very serious problem that our boundless reality poses for literature is the inadequacy of words.” The length and breadth of the Amazon is never adequately conveyed, despite the repetition of measurements. “When we speak of a river,” he continues, “a European reader is not likely to imagine something larger than the Danube, which is 2,700 kilometers long. It is hard for him to imagine . . . the reality of . . . the Amazon, which is 5,500 kilometers long. At Belén del Para [Belém] the river is wider than the Baltic Sea.”2 Nineteenth-century travelers met the challenge in diverse ways. Frederic Church wrote to his mother just after his arrival on Colombia’s Caribbean coast:

I have already seen many things that would be the making of a forist. What do you think of a huge cactus overtopping trees and some decayed and fallen like logs, and of monstrous plants resembling in the

Johann Baptist von Spix (1781–1826) and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794–1868), Germany, Vögel-Teich Am Rio de S. Francisco, Reiseatlas (1823–31)

F. de Canta

Humboldt on the Orinoco, n.d. Oil on canvas, 25.4 × 36.5 cm (10 × 14 W inches)

appearance of the leaves &c. “Life Everlasting” 20 and 30 feet high and covered with highly scented blossoms. . . . I cannot here attempt to enumerate the great variety of vegetation which I saw even in this barren part of the country but shall keep my eyes open.3

This was one method to convey what they observed: provide a list of a few objects described in high detail, then indicate the incompleteness of the inventory. Humboldt had spent a lifetime pondering the descriptive potential of language, and its ability to convey what he termed the “physiognomy” or distinctive topographical character of the land. Although he published over thirty volumes of written exegesis, he despaired of his own verbal eforts: “Notwithstanding all the richness and adaptability of our language, to attempt to designate in words, that which, in fact, appertains only to the imitative art of the painter, is always fraught with difculty.”4

The challenge to convey the impossible reality of Latin America fell to the visual artist. The landscapist’s role in picturing Latin America was as diverse as the region’s terrain. Foreign artists came from all over Europe, including Austria, Belgium, and Italy, along with larger contingents from France and Germany. France’s colonial holdings in Haiti and French Guiana, and strong ties to the Brazilian imperial family led to a robust aesthetic presence for the French. The activities of British artists paralleled their nation’s commercial interests in Latin America, and were spread out across the hemisphere, from Mexico to the Southern Cone. Germany also sent substantial numbers of artists across the Atlantic, inspired in part by direct contact with Humboldt. The evolving relationship between the United States and Latin America during the long nineteenth century extended from the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine (1823) to the opening of the Panama Canal (1915) and stimulated many artists to head south. When Frederic Church’s two Andean sojourns of 1853 and 1857 in turn produced spectacularly popular artworks, he further catalyzed artistic mining of tropical subjects, both at home and abroad. Besides Church, Martin Johnson Heade, Norton Bush, Henry Augustus Ferguson, Charles de Wolf Brownell, and others all headed south. There was also a growing school of native artists who depicted their homelands. Such perspectives are signifcantly provided by José María Velasco in Mexico, Martín Tovar y Tovar in Venezuela, Jean-León Pallière in the Pampas, Juan Manuel Blanes in Uruguay, and Marc Ferrez with his photographic practice in Brazil.

Stylistically their images ran the spectrum from simple topographical pencil drawings by a ship’s crew member to painterly oil studies of noteworthy motifs from architecture or tree specimens, and culminated in large-scale salon pictures intended for public exhibition. Subjects ranged from the Andes to the Amazon, and from coastal harbors to tropical forests. Sometimes artists traveled with an expedition party, or at least a fellow explorer. British draftsman Frederick Catherwood made two separate trips to the Yucatan with Mayan explorer John Lloyd Stephens, and afterwards illustrated the narratives of their travels. By the century’s end Auguste Morisot was a member of a French expedition led by Jean Chafanjon that explored along the French Orinoco River (see pp. 238–250). At other times they traveled alone, even taking up residence for extended periods, as Conrad Wise Chapman did in Mexico. If an expedition failed to include an artist in the party then other arrangements had to be made to ensure illustrations for their reports. Such was the case with Robert Schomburgk, who in the 1830s and 1840s made successive expeditions to the interior of Guiana on behalf of the Royal Geographic Society, London. There he encountered John Morrison, a draftsman living in the colony, and procured sketches from him. But Morrison was quickly expunged from the record as Schomburgk claimed that the sketches were done under his direction and—once back in London—elaborated on by British watercolorist Charles Bentley, who was credited with the illustrations in the fnal publication. It was not uncommon to use any available image made on the spot, and upon returning home to turn it over to a professional artist for embellishment. Humboldt had himself made sketches on his equinoctial travels and then turned them over to Parisian printmakers for elaboration into illustrations for his Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. These in turn provided one source for transforming landscape scenery into a picture.

Pictorial Conventions: The Sublime, Beautiful, and Picturesque

Having recently extricated themselves from Spanish rule, these countries now had the opportunity to exert their own independence. Feelings of pride in a new self-identity mixed with the fear of being regarded as provincial. The dilemma was palpable. The Orinoco or the Andes lacked a pictorial history, and inspired few local landscape paintings to serve as models. At this critical juncture in the formation of Latin America, European culture exerted a strong authority. Just as villages and eventually cities civilized the raw, open spaces of the countryside,

so the scenery could be “tamed” by landscape painters’ access to European traditions. Foremost among these was the compositional formula associated with the aesthetic categories codifed in Britain and on the Continent.

From the late eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, debates about landscape centered on three aesthetic ideals: the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque. These terms are most usefully understood as modes of landscape, alternative ways of viewing, understanding, and delineating the natural world. When artists frst confronted the incomprehensible vegetation, waterways, and land forms of Latin America, these modes provided a system of analyzing their empirical as well as their emotional reactions, thereby guiding their pictorial responses. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) Edmund Burke distinguished the sublime from the beautiful for its capacity to evoke awe:

Whatever is ftted in any sort to excite the idea of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible . . . is a source of the sublime: that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.5

The main causes of the sublime were darkness, obscurity, privation, or vastness. In terms of subject matter, this translated into soaring mountains, crashing waterfalls, erupting volcanoes, dark caverns, and vast open plains. Salvator Rosa’s canvases were considered the epitome of the sublime, with their threatening skies, storm-blasted trees, and menacing banditti.

Beauty, by contrast, is comprehensible to the mind and conjures up familiar and pleasurable experiences. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Judgment (1790), described how a viewer projects beauty onto natural objects and how such experiences create a sense of satisfaction and delight. His writings helped justify both contemplation of scenery for its sheer formal beauty, and adherence to an idealized view of nature. The picturesque, according to one of its earliest theorists, Uvedale Price, was the intermediate category between the sublime and the beautiful. In his infuential Essay on the Picturesque (1794) Price argued that the work of the great seventeenth-century landscapists Rubens and, especially, Claude should be used as models for the “improvement of real landscape.”6 The prototypical Claudian landscape conveyed an idealized, orderly world with a central mountain peak, body of calm, refective water in the foreground before it, and trees framing the scene

left and right. The seventeenth-century master had compiled drawings after his paintings into a book called the Liber Veritatis [Book of Truth] to document his authorship and thus guard against forgeries. In 1776–77 Josiah Boydell then published over 200 engravings after the pages, which made the Claudian prototypes available to those lacking access to his painted work. Soon the vogue for “picturesque voyages” expanded the original defnition in time and space to apply to travel farther afeld—including Cuba or Brazil, where Claude’s visual language was expanded to embrace exotic, local elements. These conventions began to serve as a “civilizing stamp” that traveler artists imposed on the colonial lands they began to explore, from the Indian subcontinent to Africa and the Americas. They also became staples of art schools that were established in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America and were conveyed to local artists as part of the academic tradition.

Landscape into Art

Land is terrain, a physical entity. Landscape is a cultural construct. Terrain becomes landscape when people project their hopes, desires, and memories onto it. When an artist confronts a landscape, he creates pictures that speak to the body politic of shared values and contributes to the forging of community. Often this discussion is cast in terms of a national landscape. How do Velasco’s renderings of the Valley of Mexico speak to his newly independent countrymen, for example, or what did Tovar y Tovar’s images convey to his fellow Venezuelans? In the case of Latin America, its nineteenth-century landscape art is to a large degree the product of foreign eyes and hands. The range of artists coming from diferent countries and representing diverse constituencies makes that history remarkably interesting, but more complex to tell. Scholars remind us that there is no such thing as an “innocent eye”—that all artistic production is in some way political. We must take this into account beginning with the earliest traveler artists such as Post, who arrived in Pernambuco with John Maurice of Nassau- Siegen, whose governorship of the colony (1637–44) was the high-water mark of Dutch power in Brazil. Post’s Brazilian scenes can be interpreted in many ways, but must address these colonial power relations. Two centuries later, when the New England-born Frederic Church exhibited his Andean compositions in New York City and in nine other cities around the country, they delighted audiences with their realistic renderings of snowcapped peaks, tropical plants, and birds. But with Manifest Destiny being the order of the day, some of his countrymen gazed

Matthäus Seutter (1678–1757), Germany

Novus Orbis sive America, 1735

Hand-colored engraving, 56.5 × 49.5 cm (22 N × 19 K inches)

upon the painted scenery as “our southern continent”: territory ripe for colonization, especially by the slaveholding South. Conrad Wise Chapman, by contrast, had been a soldier-artist for the Confederate Army before he headed to Latin America. Some might read a Southern perspective into his repeated renderings of Mexico, which—like the Confederacy—had been invaded by the United States military. At times these power relations are incorporated into the pictorial matrix. Works such as Lima and the Port of Callao (see p. 137) presents a rise of land in the foreground from which a group of fgures gaze out on the scene. From their elevated position they look down onto the panorama of the busy port and the many ships in the harbor. Albert Boime has dubbed this perspective the “magisterial gaze.” This elevated view, he argues, linked the landscape art inextricably to political and social policies of expansion and imperialism.7

British artists had visited much of Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina, including their colonies in the Caribbean and Guiana (162 years under British rule). In Guiana in 1837, the British explorer Robert Hermann Schomburgk discovered “a vegetal wonder,” a giant water lily that he described in a letter sent back to the Royal Geographic Society. The arrival of his letter coincided with the coronation of Queen Victoria, who adopted the exotic fower as a personal symbol that enjoyed a vogue in England along with the tropical aquatic greenhouses necessary for them to grow in this alien climate. Little wonder that Schomburgk selected it for the cover of the album documenting his expedition. What could be taken at face value as an accurate botanical illustration became emblematic of British penetration of the southern continent. These few examples stand for the many of the landscapes in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros that lend themselves to multiple and even multinational interpretations.

Art and Science

The natural sciences were handmaidens to art in the nineteenth century. Botany, zoology, and ornithology all fed the drive to travel to new places and discover new species. The collecting and rendering of plants played a prominent role in Latin America, beginning with Albert Eckhout—Post’s artist-companion on the Brazilian expedition—who delineated the strange new fruits and vegetables with great verve. But developments in geology—the science of the Earth—attracted even more widespread popular attention, as they challenged biblical accounts of creation. How did the Earth come into being? How did

mountains form? These were questions that preoccupied scientists and the public alike, including artists.

According to the nineteenth-century art journal The Crayon, just as the fgure painter studied the human body and anatomy, so the landscape painter must master geology.8 Newly formed mountains and especially active volcanoes were thought to hold the secrets to creation, and what better place to study them than in the Andes? Ecuador was an especially promising arena of exploration, with what Humboldt termed its “Avenue of Volcanoes” providing a string of some of the most numerous and distinctive peaks in the world. Painters and draftsmen along with naturalists headed there, to experience their terrestrial rumblings, scale their heights, glimpse their gaping craters, and bring home sketches of all they had observed that would serve as both illustrations for texts and fne art painting. Their fnished canvases, considered as geography lessons in paint, instructed a generation in the natural history of Latin America.

The City versus the Country

One of the central dichotomies of Latin American history is that of the relationship between urban and rural life, which plays out both in literature and the visual arts. Domingo Sarmiento made the argument for Argentina in the 1850s in his Civilization and Barbarism. But Andrés Bello’s “Ode to Tropical Agriculture” (“Silva a la Agricultura de la Zona Tórrida”; 1826) is the foundational text for the newly independent nations of Spanish America. The young Bello served as tutor to Simón Bolívar in Caracas and there met Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, who stimulated his lifelong interest in natural science evident in his “Ode.” Following Virgil’s Georgics, it traces civilization’s problems to the evils of the city and advocates for the simplicity of rural farm life.9 This was a theme congenial to artists. Wilhelm Heine made the argument pictorially in a bucolic, large-scale painting of sparsely inhabited green felds with horses roaming free on the shores of Lake Nicaragua. These dualities play out too in Brazil, where the tradition of depicting the region as a natural paradise untouched by humanity (see p. 199) was tempered by the growing need to present the nation to the world as a cosmopolitan country with modern cities and prosperous industry (see p. 139). A rare image of the port of Asunción (see p.  117) depicts substantial numbers of immigrants disembarking at the wharf, calling attention to another aspect of this duality: the need to attract people to move into the raw, empty spaces of the interior

of the southern continent that cried out for settlement. In Havana Bay (see p. 127) the United States-based Charles de Wolf Brownell achieved a compromise between the built-up forms of the city that extends to the horizon and the foreground stretch of verdant farmland with which it is in balance. Scenes of cultivated nature would replace those of wild, endlessly fertile nature and embody Bello’s landscape of independence.

Land versus the Sea

Most of the existing literature on Latin American art after Independence focuses on images of terra frma. The impact of the oceanic frontiers of the Atlantic and Pacifc, however, is rarely taken into account. This is a signifcant omission, for as any one of the traveler artists would attest, ocean and even river travel was far quicker and safer than overland routes. Jules Louis Philippe Coignet’s European Travelers Ambushed in a Forest (see p. 22) documented just one of the many perils that awaited the traveler on foot or on the back of a horse or mule. Most navy personnel and sailors were trained in draftsmanship, and produced a large body of drawings of the many ports of call they made all over Latin America. The port of Rio de Janeiro alone, famed for its graceful outlines and deep waters, was depicted by scores of amateur and professional artists. These works are signifcant also as witness to Latin America’s importance in global maritime exchange. Caracas (see p. 123), Guayaquil (see p. 133), Callao (see p. 137), Valparaíso (see p. 115), Montevideo (see p. 121): every major port around the region participated in these commercial and cultural exchanges, as evidenced by these pictures. When rendering these busy ports artists often took pains to include specifc depictions of the ships tied up in the harbor, complete with their identifying national fags. In the coastal view of Robinson Crusoe Island (see pp.  130–131), for example, the fags tell us just which ships have stopped here, and remind us that what may seem like a remote spot was on the shipping routes of the period. Together these images pictorially reinforce Latin America as a critical site of international maritime trade, and concomitantly key locales for important cultural and artistic exchanges.

Circulation of Images and Artists

From the Age of Discovery to the end of the nineteenth century multinational scientifc, cartographic, and artistic surveys transformed what had been terra incognita for the outside world into a knowable

geographic region. Like maps, travel narratives, and photographs, landscape pictures were key documents that contributed to global perceptions of Latin America.

Images by traveler artists were not, for the most part, tucked away into local collections for private consumption. Rather, they circulated broadly, and in a variety of formats, to reach audiences in Europe, the United States, and beyond. This practice began with Post’s canvases. Soon after their completions they were dispatched as gifts by the artist’s Dutch patron John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen to heads of state all over Europe, with more than thirty paintings by the artist presented to Louis XIV of France in 1679. Later the Gobelins Tapestry Manufactory used them as the basis for the popular tapestry series “The Ancient Indies.”

By the late eighteenth century, as the locus of the sugar trade transferred from the Dutch plantations in Brazil to the British Caribbean, so too did the locus of artistic interest. By 1778 a series of six engravings entitled Views in the Island of Jamaica, based on pictures painted by George Robertson, were published in London (see p. 98). In this case the images stood largely on their own without supporting text, but soon the vogue for albums of picturesque travel—combining text with image—encompassed South American subjects. Upon his return to Europe from travels in Brazil (1821–25) Johann Moritz Rugendas brought with him a vast collection of drawings, one hundred of which were reproduced as lithographs and published in Paris by Godefroy Engelmann as Voyage pittoresque au Brésil (1827–35) with a text by Marie Philippe Aimé de Golbery in French and German. So great was interest in his work that plates from his book were used as a panorama sold commercially as wallpaper and also as designs for dinnerware commissioned by Louis-Philippe, King of France, from the Sèvres factory. Frederick Catherwood’s images were produced as line drawings in two travel accounts by John Lloyd Stephens, and subsequently in a self-published folio volume of handcolored lithographs. Along with books, Catherwood also created a largescale panorama of his travel highlights that was enhanced by a display of objects he had brought back with him from Yucatan.

Some artists followed hurried itineraries that did not allow for extended stays in any one place, but others resided for signifcant periods in major cities, where they were able to either exhibit their work or fnd other means to establish links with local artists and patrons. Rugendas spent many years traversing the length and breadth of Latin America, and often sold works locally that then resided in regional collections and served as inspiration for other artists. In the 1860s Martin

Heade had headed to Brazil to study its hummingbird population and created a remarkable series of panel paintings of the tiny winged creatures that he exhibited at the annual art exhibition in Rio de Janeiro. In one of the few instances in his career when he received ofcial recognition, the artist was awarded the Order of the Rose by Emperor Dom Pedro II for that groundbreaking work. In the 1870s Henry Ferguson hung his work in a local art show in Santiago de Chile.

International expositions became another venue for the display of Latin American imagery. Mexico and Brazil especially sent landscape art to the international expositions that were mounted in cities in Europe and the United States from 1853 until 1893. Similarly, leading native artists began to be deployed as cultural ambassadors for their respective countries. J. M. Velasco’s work was shown at world exposi-

tions in Philadelphia in 1876 and Paris in 1889. By 1893 the artist and one of his sons were present in Chicago to help mount the display of Mexican art at the Columbian Exposition. Marc Ferrez’s photographs became a staple of Brazilian expositions abroad, and appeared widely in international publications. Although more research is needed into patterns of collecting Latin American landscape imagery by local as well as international patrons, preliminary evidence suggests it varied from country to country. Landscape seemed to fnd favor among the Brazilian elite, while in Peru there was less of a taste for this branch of art. But the venues for collection and display discussed here ensured that the scenery of countries from Mexico to the tip of Tierra del Fuego were becoming increasingly familiar to audiences in Europe and the United States, and entered into an international dialogue.

Art Academies and Instruction in Landscape Art

Art schools were powerful purveyors of artistic conventions, which were inculcated into the national traditions via art instruction, annual exhibitions, and competitions for scholarships to study in Europe. Providing a bridge between local traditions and Western artistic practices, they helped to establish common ground across the diferent countries and shared points of contact between artists in Europe and the Americas. Important art academies were established in Mexico City, Havana, Caracas, and Rio de Janeiro, and these institutions became contact zones between the Old and New Worlds. While European academies did not traditionally teach landscape as a separate discipline, their counterparts across the Americas instructed pupils in the intricacies of landscape painting and fostered an appreciation of the direct observation of nature. The oldest art school in the Americas, the Academy of San Carlos, was founded in 1781 in Mexico City as the School of Engraving. Stafed initially by instructors from Spain, it continued to advocate classic, European-style training until 1913. There Eugenio Landesio taught the perspective and landscape class, and encouraged students to work from nature. From him, his student José María Velasco learned Claudian composition and Barbizon touch, including the ability to capture light and atmosphere in a painting.

Following the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in Brazil, King Dom João VI invited a group of artists from France (later called the French Artistic Mission) that included Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, JeanBaptiste Debret, and Joachim Lebreton. They established what became under the Emperor Dom Pedro I the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts of

Jules Louis Philippe Coignet (1789–1860), France, European Travelers Ambushed in a Forest, 1835, oil on canvas, 56.2 × 47 cm (22 V × 18 K inches)

Rio de Janeiro, where they laid the foundations of an academic style. They promoted neoclassical values, which in landscape painting gave rise to moral and idealistic content. Unlike most art academies that emphasized fgure drawing, here the curriculum included a course on “Landscape, Flowers, and Animals” that assisted in developing a taste for these branches of art. Taunay’s View of the Road from the Quebra Chángala in the Alto da Boa Vista (see p. 207) provides an idea of the character of the work created by one of the Brazilian Academy’s pioneering art instructors.

Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro was founded in 1818 in Havana as the Free School of Drawing and Painting by the French painter Jean Baptiste Vermany, its frst director. It was the only such art academy in the Caribbean, and therefore was an infuential institution. A little later, about 1835, the Academy of Drawing and Painting [Academia de Dibujo y Pintura] was founded in Caracas. As director of the Academy, the Neopolitan painter Alessandro Ciccarelli helped spread the taste for landscape art. His View of Rio de Janeiro (see p. 110) provides an idea of the classically ordered and somewhat idealized image he advocated in the rendering of the Latin American landscape. A small but important canvas by Frederic Church of the Ecuadorian volcano Cotopaxi (see p. 147) provides an important link between the artists of the United States and Latin America. Church painted it during his visit to Quito in 1853 and presented it to Antonio Salas, the patriarch of Ecuador’s leading artistic dynasty. It later passed to his son Rafael Salas, who as a professor in the art academy of his native city made it a part of the teaching collection there. While the Salas family had begun as creators of colonial religious art, they transformed their practice after Independence to serve the new republic with secular art, including portraits and costumbrista pictures. Inspired by Humboldt’s accounts and the little canvas by Church, Rafael Salas went on to distinguish himself as a landscape painter of Ecuador.

Conclusion

The study of Latin American landscape art is a work in progress. It is premature to restrict our inquiries to specifc countries, themes, or an established canon. Certain artists such as Church, Rugendas, and Velasco have been recognized for some time; some unidentifed artists will eventually be linked to a known hand; and others still await discovery. But all evidence points to a growing feld of art history that consists of remarkable visual images that played signifcant historic

roles. All seeing, as E. H. Gombrich reminds us, is a form of knowing.10 These landscape pictures stimulated nationalist sentiments at home even as they entered into global circulation and awakened the outside world to the natural wonders of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.

1 Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J. M. Cohen. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1963), 216.

2 Gabriel García Márquez, “Latin America’s Impossible Reality,” Harper’s Magazine 270 (January 1985): 14.

3 Frederic Church to Mrs. Church, 28 April 1853, New Granada. Joseph Downs Manuscript Collection, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Wilmington, Delaware.

4 Alexander Von Humboldt, Views of Nature (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850), 223.

5 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 36–7.

6 Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: J. Robson, 1794), 67.

7 Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting c. 1830–1865 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). There are many other iterations of this idea in the subsequent literature.

8 “The Relation between Geology and Landscape Painting,” The Crayon 6 (1859): 255–56.

9 For a good discussion of this text see Jerry Hoeg, “Andrés Bello’s ‘Ode to Tropical Agriculture,’” in Beatriz Rivera-Barnes and Jerry Hoeg, ed. Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 53–66.

10 Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon, 1960), 299.

the traveler artist : the construction of landscape , the picturesque , and the sublime

pablo diener

Landscape painting has persistently been subjected to interpretations that seek to assign it a strictly naturalist value. The presumption that landscape painting ofers a mimetic view that can be evaluated according to its fdelity and verisimilitude has been difcult to eradicate. However, over the years, and in light of the enormous production of landscape paintings, this interpretation has been challenged more and more. Landscape has come to be increasingly regarded as a complex genre that must also be understood as a symbolic language, with the most diverse connotations. The language of landscape painting can evoke associations with diferent spheres of existence; it can represent our yearning for knowledge, express issues of territorial control and dominion, and construct monuments of national identity.

In the feld of research, this genre has been studied in numerous works, beginning most notably in those by Kenneth Clark and Ernst Gombrich,1 and more recently, those by William J. T. Mitchell and Simon Schama.2 The titles of the books by Mitchell and Schama draw attention to the role of landscape painting as an expression of power or as the construction of memory. All of these authors state that the artistic representation of the landscape isn’t so much merely visual as it is conceptual; that is to say, landscape is a cultural expression. Landscape painting appears as an intermediary between the natural and the cultural, between nature and man. Thus, it does not have a fundamentally mimetic character. It isn’t simply a view; it always evokes other values. These approaches to understanding landscape painting apply not only to those made in Europe, but also to American landscapes. They allow us to address the fact that works from the frst era of landscape painting in the Americas are not simple views or merely accurate portrayals of physical spaces, but are also expressions of symbolic language.

Scientific Expeditions and Landscape Painting in the American Continent

From the eighteenth century onward, American space has been recorded by illustrators and artists who traveled as part of scientifc delegations, or, in the nineteenth century, by painters who embarked individually on artistic journeys. The images they produced enchant us as records of places that, in many cases, no longer remain in their natural state. The paintings of the Valley of Mexico, of the exuberant vegetation of the Atlantic Forest close to Rio de Janeiro, or of the mountainous valleys of the Andes tend to attract our attention as a memory of the appearance they used to have in another time. Undoubtedly,

this is one of the values of this type of painting. But we can develop other interpretations of these works while trying to identify relevant moments not only in the sensory impressions, but also the conceptual constructions of this pictorial genre as it developed in the Americas.

For this task, it is illuminating to look at the legacies of the eighteenth century that are commonly given a foundational value in American landscape painting. In that period, Portugal and Spain promoted ventures of scientifc investigation to their colonial domains that, in addition to knowledge, also produced important collections of visual records of the landscape. From these, the tradition of iconographic production by travelers in Latin America was born. In this context, the legacies of the expeditions by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira in Brazil are particularly noteworthy, undertaken by order of the Portuguese Crown between 1783 and 1792. Another signifcant expedition was led by Alessandro Malaspina in Spanish America, an enterprise also organized by the colonial administration, in this case of Spain, between 1789 and 1794.

Ferreira’s “philosophical journey” was a true epic of exploration, undertaken inland within the Portuguese colonial domains by a small group of members who were entrusted with the ambitious task of studying the most diverse felds of knowledge: botany, zoology, ethnography, and territorial registry. The illustrators José Joaquim Freire and Joaquim José Codina had an important role in these tasks. In documents of the time, they are always mentioned as riscadores [draftsmen]—that is, professionals trained in the tradition of technical drawing, whose task was to make illustrations of plants, animals, and human types, and also to elaborate a fairly comprehensive collection of views of the fuvial trip undertaken. The latter are, in fact, representations of the rivers as routes for penetration into the continent, and also meticulous illustrations of territorial occupation by the Portuguese, either as urban establishments or military strongholds. Considered as a sort of landscape painting, these representations of rivers are particularly interesting, and were shown together with maps and plans of cities.

The instrumental role of these works doesn’t disqualify them as sensitive images, and they contain visible emotional traces associated with the eighteenth-century aesthetic category of the sublime. The difcult navigation through turbulent rivers in fragile canoes vulnerable to sinking because of relentless currents, accidents, and rocky waterfalls is among the subjects of the compositions by these technically trained illustrators. Thus, though their main objective was to contribute to the

creation of instrumental documentation that would show the colony’s administrators how the fuvial roads circulated inside its domains, the watercolors by these draftsmen also conveyed the emotion of their journey. They are images linked to the drawings of maps, and despite their instrumental purpose as a tool of power, they subtly show the sensibility of these travelers.3

If we look at the works by the painters commissioned by Alessandro Malaspina to make visual records of the expedition sponsored by the Spanish crown, we will fnd a collection of artworks with very similar characteristics.4 It is worth recalling that, unlike the Portuguese journey, the Spanish endeavor put a stronger emphasis on the exploration of the coasts of its colonial domains. So, there are many studies of the contours of coasts and bays, which are ultimately also instrumental. Among this collection, the compositions by two Italian painters who joined the journey when it was well underway stand out; here I am referring specifcally to the works of art by Juan Francisco de Ravenet and Fernando Brambila. It is clear that these artists unleashed their sensibility when they encountered the coastal landscapes, especially in such magnifcent places as, for instance, the ones they saw in passing Cape Horn. There, the maritime world imposed itself with its intimidating dimensions and was not merely grasped as an instrumental, aseptic record of the maritime route; it was interpreted in a pictorial

language with a strong emotional charge. Browsing through these watercolors, the observer sees an imposing geography and faces the emotion and sometimes even the terror it awoke in these travelers.

In the eighteenth century there was a more or less implicit naturalistic requirement for the illustrators of scientifc expeditions to design their artworks as objective data and not as subjective compositions. However, artistic tradition shows that, even in the case of the civil servants commissioned for the accurate recording of predefned topics in the course of scientifc exploration for territorial dominion, no illustrator was able to suppress his individual sensibility within the visual representations he made.

Aesthetic Categories for Landscape Painting in the Americas

On the one hand, history provides a context for understanding these images and assigns them the utilitarian function under which they were commissioned. They are images linked to the exercise of power, commissioned as tools to improve colonial dominion and exploitation. On the other hand, we confrm the existence of a category of reference, studied and discussed in the feld of philosophy, which allows us to approach these paintings in their emotional connotations. This category is the notion of the sublime.

The sublime was frst studied by Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), and shortly thereafter by Immanuel Kant in Beobachtungen

Fernando Brambila (1763–1832), Italy, View of Buenos Aires, Malaspina Expedition (1789–94), watercolor, Museo Naval, Madrid

Fernando Brambila (1763–1832), Italy, View of Lima from the Bullring Surroundings, Malaspina Expedition (1789–94), watercolor, Museo Naval, Madrid

über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen [Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime; 1764].

Both Burke and Kant focus their analysis on the perspective of the subject, and observe the impression caused by the properties of the object on the individual. Regarding beauty, Burke mentions “those qualities in bodies, by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it.”5 Among these he mentions being comparatively small and of smooth texture, presenting a gradual variation, having a delicate profle and possessing clear and bright, but not excessively strong nor brilliant colors. Conversely, as for the sublime, the specifc characteristics, according to Burke, are “whatever is ftted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror.”6 Among the qualities that cause this feeling are darkness, greatness, magnifcence, and grandeur.

Translated to landscape painting, these qualities of beauty manifest as archetypes in the harmony of an Arcadian space where balance prevails in all aspects of the composition, causing a feeling of placid calm. Conversely, according to Kant, the sublime materializes in the view of a mountain with snowy peaks that rise above the clouds or in the description of a raging storm. According to the philosopher of Königsberg, the night is sublime, the day is beautiful; the sublime moves, the beautiful entrances.7 With these and other comparisons between the two notions, Kant ofers sensitive characterizations of categories regarding the sphere of taste-ideas that have a clear antecedent in Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry and that Kant would continue elaborating for a quarter of a century until he published his Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of Judgment; 1790].

In a dialogue with the subjective aspects attributed to the categories of the beautiful and the sublime in the eighteenth century, a concept emerged that we can fnd in almost all references to landscape painting of the nineteenth century, one particularly related to the work by travelers: that of the picturesque landscape. Picturesque travel is an aesthetic category that was used more and more frequently in writing by travelers from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. And with his prestige and fabulous capacity for communication, Alexander von Humboldt sanctioned the use of this notion for the visual narratives of the American continent in his Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous People of the Americas 8 As the author states in the presentation of this work, he intends to ofer a selection of “the

crude monuments of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the picturesque views of the mountainous lands that these people inhabited.” These picturesque sites have a multifaceted character that, in his opinion, is at times cheerful, at other times savage (“une nature riant ou sauvage”), and has had a decisive infuence in the customs and creations of these nations.9

With these personal and subjective observations Alexander von Humboldt put an end to the paradoxical demand of objectivity by scientifc and political enterprises regarding the production of textual and visual records. In his writings and iconographic production he explicitly included aspects of individual sensibility. And he created a methodology that defned a new model for records, particularly for those who traveled to the American continent. Clearly, we are looking at an aesthetic category of broad spectrum that seems to serve the purpose of giving meaning to experiences in the Western hemisphere. With a large diversity of meanings throughout the nineteenth century, the concept of the picturesque infuenced the look travelers cast on the territories they traversed.

The picturesque began to consolidate toward the end of the eighteenth century as a theory of art, specifcally in the writings of William Gilpin.10 In fact, towards the last decades of that century, the concept was used as an aesthetic category that fuctuated between the beautiful and the sublime, at a moment in time—particularly during

Alexander von Humboldt in his Library, chromolithograph copy of watercolor by Eduard Hildebrandt, 1856 (Berlin: Storch & Kramer) Graphic Arts Collection

Romanticism—when the conceptual repertoire of aesthetics gained subjective connotations and moved away from the formal canons of the classical world.

In a dialogue mindful of these categories, Gilpin describes the English landscape, trying to articulate nature while approaching it via the compositional principles of painting. As he writes in his Observations on the River Wye (1782), nature “is an admirable colourist, and can harmonize her tints with infnite variety, and inimitable beauty: but is seldom so correct in composition, as to produce an harmonious whole.” In his opinion, there is always a lack of proportion in the scenes, or some unfortunate trace crosses the ensemble, or, even, some badly located tree; in brief, there is always something that “is not exactly what it should be.”11 In this manner, the picturesque acquired a normative value. In that sense Gilpin states that “we seek it among all the ingredients of landscape—trees—rocks—brokengroun ds—woods—rivers—lakes—plains—valleys—mountains—and distances. These objects in themselves produce infnite variety. No two rocks, or trees are exactly the same. They are varied, a second time, by combination; and almost as much, a third time, by diferent lights, and shades, and other aerial efects. Sometimes we fnd among them the exhibition of a whole; but oftener we fnd only beautiful parts.”12

The artist’s hand must intervene precisely in the construction of balance in the combination, putting in practice a corrective principle to attempt to create a harmonious whole. This idea was in force among traveling artists for a long time. We fnd it, for example, in Thomas Ender’s beautifully composed views of Rio de Janeiro, in which the representation of rural work, performed by slaves, matches the vegetation of succulent green tones and the view of rural space inside the city. And several decades later, the picturesque appears in the magnifcent and skillful compositions by Anton Goering and Adolf Methfessel, who organize their views from a foreground of dense vegetation that opens like a window to a bright landscape in the background.

The views are not casual; they are the result of a complex construction. Clearly, the canons that defne the models of picturesque perfection difer from one author to the next, both in the concrete practice of painting as in the sphere of theoretical speculation. The elegance of the classicist spirit that Gilpin attempts to cultivate is contrasted, for example, with the passion for Gothic ruins, for isolated rural shacks.13 This opposition shows the pendulous movement of the picturesque between the notions of the beautiful and the sublime.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), Germany, Fall of Tequendama, engraving by George Cooke. Published by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, London, 1812

The picturesque gradually became a means to assimilate the experience of that which is strange, that is to say, to domesticate the unknown and organize the unstructured. Artistic language fulflls the function of ofering artists a tool for mediation that made it possible to rearrange reality according to predefned canons. It would be difcult to cite a universally valid defnition of the picturesque. From its original meaning, which referred to pictorial tradition, the defnition of this concept changed until it came to evoke that which attracts and entertains the eye, that which stimulates the senses of the spectator. In a broad sense, the picturesque became the representation of variety, diversity, and irregularity.

In that sense, Humboldt qualifed the Tequendama Falls, in his Views of the Cordilleras, as a place that “meets all the conditions a place requires to be eminently picturesque.” The volume of falling river water is signifcant, the height of the fall is considerable, but it is also worth noting “the confguration of the soil and the appearance of the rocks, the vigor and shape of the trees and herbaceous plants, their distribution in groups or scattered bunches, the contrast between stone masses and the freshness of vegetation give these great scenes of nature a particular charm.”14 Generally, it was by working within this category, in a fashion that evokes more roughness and strength and less

neoclassical sophistication, that traveling artists took on the task of representing the landscape of the Americas in the nineteenth century.

The Traveler Artist’s Self- Confidence in the Ninet eenth Century

Traveler artists could openly let their individual sensibility pour out. In this sense, we may refer to them as artists and no longer as illustrators. Many times, the objects of their attention were a continuation of the motifs that had already become famous in the previous century. But each traveler’s individual apprehensions decidedly responded to his own perception and sensibility.

The methodology of these artists, particularly in the frst half of the nineteenth century, adopted the procedures recommended by Humboldt. Thus, it was understood that the procedure responded to a scientifc norm, but this didn’t impose uninspired imitation of the model. In landscape painting the artist obtained a space of creation, inasmuch as Humboldt’s proposition consisted of the artist understanding and interpreting a territory according to the logic studied by physical geography, a discipline that the naturalist from Berlin had developed with particular attention. The artist had to study, to know how a certain space operated, to know its geomorphological confguration, and identify its foral possibilities according to altitude and latitude. In short, from this knowledge, the traveler could in a certain measure create a picturesque landscape.

The German scientist promoted the production of landscape painting by artists who traveled to America, his main purpose to have artists contribute their work to enrich scientifc knowledge. He published his widespread Physical Table of the Equinoctial Regions included in Essay on the Geography of Plants, a sort of stencil to expound schematically the aspects of physical geography that infuence the confguration of the planet’s vegetal carpet. As part of the 1805 edition of the Essay on the Geography of Plants, he declared that the image lacked picturesque attractiveness. He then asked artists to visually complement the idea elucidated in his chart, making picturesque records of the territories where contrasts are striking.

Humboldt was delighted with the images by the Count de Clarac between 1816 and 1819 of the fora of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, a place whose strongest picturesque attractiveness is the result of the abundance of plant species that coexist in close proximity. He attracted the Bavarian painter Johann Moritz Rugendas to his circle, who after working for almost four years as illustrator in the scientifc expedition

of Georg Heinrich von Langsdorf, also in Brazil, decided to undertake an artistic journey to America, from Mexico to Cape Horn, on his own account and at his own risk. It is in the correspondence with this artist that the scientist formulates, in an imperative tone, his ideas about where and how a traveler artist should work on the American continent. Mexico, in the transversal volcanic belt, and the tropics, in the Andean region, had to be the main destination of a journey to America intended to capture the most representative part of the continent.

Rugendas and Baron Gros, and later on, painters such as Conrad W. Chapman, followed the ideas set out by Humboldt. And even the emblematic value the scientist attributed to volcanoes was taken on by Mexican painters such as José María Velasco, an artist who was strongly infuenced by the Italian Eugenio Landesio, who had been his teacher at the academy.

In the Andean region, the travelers who took on Humboldt’s proposal were equally numerous, and formed a true route of the picturesque, including Ferdinand Bellermann, Albert Berg, and especially the North American painter Frederic Edwin Church. The latter wanted to emulate the scientist, to the point of composing a plausible but unreal landscape in his The Heart of the Andes, which recreates the Physical Table of the Equinoctial Regions in an essentially picturesque language.

Humboldt’s ideas spread widely in Europe and infuenced dozens of artists who were seduced to work on the American continent within the terms proposed by the naturalist. The desired interaction

Count de Clarac (1777–1847), France, Virgin Forest of Brazil, 1819, ink and watercolor on paper, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), Germany, and Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858), France, Artemis of Ephesus, (Frontispiece of Essay on the Geography of Plants) 1807, copper engraving, Yale Collection of German Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

between art and science underlies the work of all these fgures as they sought meaning for their activity. Aside from the written instructions Humboldt formulated in his work and letters, he had supplied them with a forceful visual discourse. Particularly, and with an emblematic value, the German version of the Essay on the Geography of Plants had been dedicated to the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and for this dedication a vignette by the Danish painter and sculptor Berthel Thorwaldsen was used, of Apollo uncovering Artemis of Ephesus. In allegorical language, this image expresses, in the fgure of Apollo, art’s capacity to reveal the secrets of nature, represented by Artemis. This Romantic discourse was shared by the poet and the scientist, and was revered by many of their contemporaries in the sphere of science, art, and philosophy, as it attributes the intuitive creation of poetry and visual arts with the capacity to access knowledge.15

Four decades later, in the second volume of his masterpiece, the Cosmos, Humboldt takes up that idea again, and states it explicitly

when he writes that “in landscape painting, as in every branch of the arts, one has to distinguish between what is created from modest sensorial perception and immediate observation, and the infnite that emerges from profound sensibility and the strength of intellectual abstraction.”16 And with this statement he evokes the work of Frans Post, created in the frst half of the seventeenth century during Dutch rule in the northeast of Brazil. The method proposed and put into practice at the beginning of the nineteenth century was still in force by midcentury. The idea of a creative naturalism seemed to be consolidated, which would surpass what was qualifed as “modest sensorial perception,” resorting to knowledge and intuition. This union of art and science had taken hold strongly in artists and art critics, and had been taken on as a requirement of quality in relation to the assessment of verisimilitude in a broad sense, a criterion that towards midcentury had acquired new meanings.

Changing the Content of the Aesthetic Categories

We fnd a forceful analysis in a foundational text by the painter and director of the Academy of Fine Arts of Rio de Janeiro, Manuel Araújo Porto-Alegre. In a 1855 text for Brazilian art critics in the feld of landscape painting, Porto-Alegre makes a thorough examination of how this genre had developed over the previous decades in Brazil.17 He is quite critical of the artists who had embraced this genre and refers particularly to foreign painters, mainly from France.

Porto-Alegre discusses the work of these painters and criticizes imprecisions in their recording of fora species and in their compositions of images, which he attributes to the juxtaposition of plants from diferent natural environments in the same space. The main idea of his analysis is that these painters weren’t able to apprehend the particular character of the landscape in these latitudes. That is to say, they weren’t able to practice creative naturalism as proposed by Humboldt with all due rigor. Porto-Alegre concludes his text by calling upon Brazilian artists: “Our landscape painters must be American, because from America’s nature, in particular that from Brazil, they will obtain their glory and their bread.”18

With an odd intellectual leap, the director of the academy assigns a national value to the work of landscape painters. Beyond the evaluation we can make, from a certain distance in time, of Porto-Alegre’s opinion of these painters, it is noteworthy that with this comment he introduced a new element of national character, even nationalism, into

the discussion about landscape painting on the American continent. He assumes that the mistakes he sees in landscape paintings made on the American continent by foreign artists will be corrected once native-born artists take on this task.

The nationalist tone used by Porto-Alegre isn’t an isolated phenomenon. When we go through the writings about artistic practice in the second half of the nineteenth century, we confrm that a new type of practice and evaluation of this genre also emerged in other places of the American territory. Specifcally, in Chile national sentiment represents a value for the production of landscape painting. The intellectual Eugenio María Hostos, in a comment about the National Exhibition of Arts and Industries of 1872, refers to the beauty of a Chilean landscape painting that, in his opinion, has what he calls “a sublime originality.”19

We fnd quite a coincidental formulation of intention in another art critic, Vicente Vergara Grez, when he refers to the artworks of Chilean landscapes in the same exhibition. Referring to the motifs of the Chilean landscape, he writes that there one can fnd “the most splendid valleys, the most whimsical waterfalls, and the most enchanting lakes. And as if this were not enough, the Andes as complement and the Strait [of Magellan] at the end.”20 Everything acquires a sublime character because it is part of the nation. The concept of the sublime has been transformed. It is no longer a term to characterize what in nature appears with superhuman dimensions: imposing, giant, and majestic. Natural phenomena become sublime because they are shown in association with a nationalist sentiment.

We can see that from the eighteenth century and for the better part of the nineteenth century, landscape painting continues to cultivate a constant repertoire of motifs. The formal treatment of these motifs change in part, according to stylistic tendencies. But there is an important change in the meanings attributed to the landscape in this territory that initially appeared related to needs of dominion; is later emphasized as the thirst for knowledge and as interlocutor in the dialogue between art and science; and fnally becomes a manifestation with an essentially national character. As we have seen, it has multiple meanings. In this sense we can state that, throughout this time, the representations of the Andes, the Atlantic Forest, the Valley of Mexico, and the American territories in general from Mexico to Cape Horn do not remain the same. Their symbolic meaning changes continuously, requiring our persistent reinterpretation.

(translated by cristina labarca)

1 Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (London: John Murray, 1949); Gombrich published the essay “A Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape Painting” originally in a collection of essays presented to Hans Tietze for his 70th birthday in 1950. Later on it was published in: Ernst H. Gombrich, Norm and Form (London: Phaidon Press, 1966).

2 William J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994); Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

3 For the study of fuvial courses painted by Codina and Freire during the expedition of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, see Maria de Fátima Costa, “Paisagens narrativas do espaço amazônico,” in Alcides Freire Ramos, Rosangela Patriota, and Sandra Jatahy Pesavento, eds., Imagens na História (São Paulo: Aderaldo & Rothschild, 2008), 64–77.

4 See the catalogue of works by painters of the Malaspina expedition in Carmen Sotos Serrano, Los pintores de la expedición de Alejandro Malaspina (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1982), 2 vols.

5 Edmund Burke, “A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful; with an introductory discourse concerning taste,” in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke in Twelve Volumes (London: John C. Nimmo, 1887), I: 165.

6 Burke, “A philosophical enquiry,” I: 111.

7 Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1764), 3–8.

8 Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (Paris: F. Schoell, 1810). For the English version, see: Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, ed. Vera Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

9 Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères, 3.

10 William Gilpin, “Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape,” (1792) in Aesthetics and the Picturesque, 1795–1840, ed. and introduced Gavin Budge (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001), vol. 1.

11 William Gilpin, quoted in Malcolm Andrews, “A Picturesque Template: The Tourists and their Guidebooks,” in Dana Arnold (ed.), The Picturesque in Late Georgian England Papers given at The Georgian Group Symposium (London: The Georgian Group, 1995), 4.

12 Gilpin, “Three Essays,” 42.

13 Uvedale Price, “Essays on the Picturesque, as compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and on the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Period of Improving Real Landscape,” (1810) in Aesthetics and the Picturesque: 1795–1840, ed. Gavin Budge (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001), vol. 3.

14 Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères, 21–22.

15 See Petra Werner, Naturwahrheit und ästhetische Umsetzung: Alexander von Humboldt im Briefwechsel mit bildenden Künstlern. Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Series Alexander von Humboldt Forschungsstelle, vol. 38. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013), 21–24.

16 Alexander von Humboldt. Kosmos: Entwurf einer Physischen Weltbeschreibung (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1847), II: 89–90.

17 See Alfredo Galvão, “Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre, sua infuência na Academia Imperial e no meio artístico nacional,” Revista do Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional 14 (1959): 19–120.

18 Porto-Alegre, quoted in Galvão, “Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre,” 55.

19 Catalina Valdés Echeñique, ed., Cuadros de la naturaleza em Chile: La literatura de paisaje y su literatura artística durante el siglo XIX. Introduction and notes by Catalina Valdés Echeñique (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2014), 68.

20 Ibid., 95

landscape and foundation : frans post and the invention of the american landscape

luis pérez - oramas

The Original Landscape

On October 25, 1636, the painter Frans Post embarked on a voyage that would bring him to America, into the court of John Maurice, Count of Nassau- Siegen and governor of Dutch possessions in Brazil. It was this event that propelled the invention of landscape painting in the Americas. The land of the Americas existed, the nature of the tropics existed, but there was still no landscape of that terrain, as its representation-as-landscape did not yet exist.2

Thus a strictly theoretical distance separated land (or nature) from landscape. The latter is not made out of the former, but is rather a transcription—a descriptive impression that pierces the memory of the one crafting the representation. In this way, landscape can be produced with a certain liberty, with a certain capricious autonomy in relation to the land being depicted, which is subjected to an artifcial sort of reinvention.

There is no such thing as naïve landscape: “naïveté” in landscape is nothing more than the efect of an illusion brought on by the belief that nature and landscape are one and the same. The representation of landscape would bring about the (impossible) alterity of landscape, which is unspoiled nature as virgin terrain. If landscape, by categorical diferentiation from nature, is nature plus the traits of the civilization inhabiting it (and the frst of those traits is the observing eye), then the “original landscape” would necessarily be an “inhabited landscape,” marked by humanity in the gaze that reinvents it as representation. An “original landscape,” then, is not possible, and virgin nature can only exist in an unseen state, as terra incognita, yet to be discovered. The original landscape is the landscape that we have not yet seen: a thing that exists only in the mind.

As it happens, riding on Maurice of Nassau’s ship was the frst landscape painter of the Americas, Frans Post, of Haarlem, the Netherlands. With just twenty-four years under his belt, he would go on to produce, for the conventions of art history, the “original landscapes” to feature the nature of the American tropics. Never before had an academic painter come to the Americas whose work embodied a consciousness of its own style, a sense of belonging to a broader tradition and that never-ending deliberation with the styles of earlier painters and contemporaries, which establishes the specifc nature of the modern artist as authorial subject.

Post came from a place that had fxed his eyes toward a certain type of landscape, which had established for him a specter of place

that existed prior to his actual experience of Brazil. These conventions established a grammar or topography of the places that he called upon to construct his landscapes. Though Post’s landscapes may be Brazilian, they nevertheless remain Dutch, and his works, which are alarmingly unusual for a European of his era, compare to and approach formally the landscapes of Jacob van Ruysdael, Philip de Koninck, and Jan van Goyen. This tradition leaves its mark on them and determines them simultaneously as a new, “original” landscape, and a preceding, “second” landscape which has already been seen; it is simultaneously one and the other.

Let us say then that Post came to produce a sort of utopia with his painting: that impossible landscape that is simultaneously always (and never) the frst of the landscapes. To take on such a task Post had to be completely free of conscience: he had to paint the shores of the San Francisco river, or the distant city of Frederica on the shores of Paraíba River, with the same naturalness with which Johannes Vermeer painted the city of Delft from its waters.3 Nothing stands out in these paintings as a symptom of an awareness of being frst, heroic, or original, and it is precisely their neutral surface as “pure”—meaning indiferent, almost inadvertent—landscapes, their strict and schematic

Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), Netherlands, View of Delft, c. 1660–61, oil on canvas, 98.5 × 117.5 cm (38 O × 46 N inches), Mauritshuis, The Hague

nature, their matter-of-fact manner, which sets them apart as a special chapter in the history of landscape painting in the Americas. The original landscape, like the view of the frst man to set his foot down on the moon, is disappointing, it is a novelty with which we were already familiar; it is unrecognizable as well due to its formal insignifcance. And once it has been established in the history of art, it is no longer the original landscape; like the voice of the nymph Echo, which in its reverberations can never produce an original word, every landscape is (already) a second landscape, an other landscape.4

The Mythical Landscape

This alterity of landscape, like all alterity in representation, always takes place afterward: an irrevocable hierarchy of memory and experience fxes it in a state of delay. All landscape, in being irreparably secondary, is “after the landscape”—all landscape is meta-landscape. Post developed a certain “capricious” style of landscape, whose original model would also be that part of Post’s work that was undertaken upon his return to Holland, work of foundational signifcance whose theoretical density is concealed within a fantastical forest of references: “natural fctions” and the “recollected fantasy ” of landscape. Whatever the case, a legend—if not a myth—existed for landscape: one according to which, as the Romantics would drive home again and again, the best—or only—landscape was the frst. That nonexistent illusion can only be inferred, which is unknown, which is believed to be lost and forgotten, substituted by all those landscapes that came after it. This myth, with the proliferation of landscape painting, implies the decadence of the genre, its decline and demise.

According to this Romantic vision of landscape painting, notably articulated by Gustav Carus, the landscape genre would be absolved of all necessity for perfection, and therefore it would exclude any kind of learning. The best landscapes—according to the brief words of this friend and follower of the painter Caspar David Friedrich—were the original landscapes, and the frst landscape painters brought the landscape to light in its nascent, perfect form. According to Carus, the ancient proximity to nature of those humans who were neighbors to the gods, inhabitants of its virginal splendor, provides the unachievable standard for producing landscape in its ideal form. Consequentially, any continuation of that “original landscape,” any “secondary” landscape, any product of landscape painting could be nothing more than a kind of decadence or decay.5

In addition to the apparently unresolvable problems that this argument introduces with regard to the possibility of establishing a school of landscape painting, we could add the logical certainty according to which that “original landscape” never existed. Or in any case it never transcended its status as an originating image, as an intellectual necessity whose ontological state is empty, pure loss that opens up in the original a cavity of desire through which all other landscapes have been—and will be—produced.

Thus Frans Post took up a practice, on Brazilian terrain between 1636 and 1640, that was founded in the tradition of landscape painting in which these problems were exacerbated: he painted eighteen “primitive,” simple, schematic landscapes that would become—at least the seven of them that remain today—the “original landscapes” of the Americas. But Post painted as a Dutch painter, with his eye imbued with the styles of Haarlem, looking descriptively upon only what was visible, stripping his painting of all symbolic or allegorical, narrative or rhetorical elements. In other words, he painted like a Dutchman in Brazil, running contrary to a powerful Italianate tradition. As a result, these frst landscapes are not original: they are infused with the engaged eye of a Dutch painter who introduced the conventions of a school, with its European manner of painting, along with the still undefned and unrepresented nature of the American continent. In order to complete his adventure, upon his return to Holland, Post painted “Brazilian landscapes” like an artist from another world of the distant United Provinces. These commemorations of the tropics were “landscape caprices” undertaken following a delay, a long “devolution” of the landscapes that he had digested in his youth during his transatlantic voyage.

The Doubled Time of Foundation

Every act of foundation operates according to a double temporality. Each founding is elaborated, and generates its efects, in two distinct times that are complementary, substitutable, and mutually annihilating. Thus Post, the founder of the American landscape, came to Brazil— in an original time of founding—so that later, in Holland once again, after an extensive and drawn-out period of pictorial production, he could gain consciousness—in a second time of founding, in each individual painting and in the sum total of his works—of a landscape that he had already lost and which was therefore in need of restitution (or substitution). This is when Post’s “caprices,” and “landscape painting

fantasies” began to appear, elements which have made him widely known through the present day for his double obsession: an obsession with landscape and an obsession with the tropics.6

It could be claimed that the true founding moment of the landscape in the Americas is in fact this secondary, “capricious” moment in which Frans Post composed the fctitious, imaginary landscapes, after returning to Holland. Thus the American landscape would be marked since its founding by Post with a sort of alterity that, without reducing its fdelity to the landscape, makes it a fctitious image.

This allows us to interpret the double temporality of Post’s work— eighteen primitive landscapes, along with dozens of “landscape caprices”—in the clarifying light of the modern theory of foundation proposed by Sigmund Freud at the dawn of the twentieth century, which portrays Moses, the father of monotheistic religion, as a “theoretical fction” used to formulate the hypothetical universality of those two exclusive times characteristic of the act of foundation.

So goes the Freudian account of Moses: the father of monotheistic religion was in fact another, one who came from a great distance—an Egyptian, a foreigner.7 Beyond the debatable verisimilitude of Freud’s hypothesis, it remains useful for its theoretical pertinence. According to this theory, any founding act is constituted in a change of place, a disappearance that brings about a reappearance, a substitution. Every foundation has two time periods, the time of an Egyptian who emigrates and is killed in the desert; and also the time of a substitution that will adopt that character ’s same name within another time and place, bringing the founding act to its conclusion. Every foundation is thus bound by a retrospective necessity through which something being established (a religion or a landscape), “changes in appearance [ . . . ] but at the same time: it changes places, it moves elsewhere.” The Freudian name for this operation is Entstellung, meaning deformation.8

Like a type of narcissistic refection, the founding of the American landscape by the young Frans Post may be interpreted through this Freudian fction of Moses: a foreign man arrives from abroad and brings with him—in his eyes, in the randomly descriptive matter of his pigments—an unfamiliar, formalizing way of looking at nature, of observing it with proto-narrative quietude, as if it were a possible site for all stories and therefore the site of no story—yet. The frst act of founding: eighteen serene, schematic images, with their fat skies foating above the earth. These landscapes stood in opposition to all the legendary expectations that the discovery of America had awakened in the Western

imagination, in line with the delusive descriptions of the chroniclers: Heavens, Edens, Utopias, El Dorados. Only in this way can we understand the meaning of how they were experienced, meaning their inherent burden of disillusionment. America the unnamable is, in these landscapes, nothing more than an open sky, a riverbank free of danger, a disquieting and muted contrast between, for example, four nude indigenous people peacefully anchored in the distance beyond a fort on the banks of the Rio Grande, and the unhurried density of its deep and marshy waters.

Compared to the landscapes Post would later create, these frst paintings appear to be fundamentally characterized by that dispossession. They contain fgures—but barely—and their composition is schematic.9 Micro-narratives of an unknown land not yet embodied in legend, these frst landscapes by Post contrast with his later works in that all of the fgures are gathering together, all of the plants are growing, and all of the fowers glow. In them, the races of the Americas dance or move, coexisting in the same space as ruins, convents, huts, and even the biblical sacrifce of Manoah, with its gleaming archangel perched in the Brazilian sky.

The banality of Post’s early landscapes—an immense cactus and a small, inofensive animal feeding on the grass marking the focal center of a landscape of the San Francisco River with Fort Mauricio in the distance—would eventually be lost. Recollection, deformation,

Frans Post (1612–1680), Netherlands, The River San Francisco and Fort Maurice in Brazil, 1639, oil on canvas, 62 × 95 cm (24 W × 37 W inches), Photo: Franck Raux © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

and substitution embellished his fading memories of the past with dense and fresh foliage. So, it must be said of these early landscapes that they constitute the fguration of the landscape of the Americas as desert, and that therefore what appeared to be a purely theoretical certainty—that the paradigmatic model for landscape, its ideal mold, is the desert—obtains historical confrmation in Post with chronological and stylistic precision: the “original landscape” reconfgures (and differs from) the landscape as desert. 10

When considering Post, the limits of Freud’s theory of foundation are traced by the fact that it was a single painter who was responsible for both of these founding moments of the landscape in the Americas. The frst, unwitting, observes the formation of a new nation and registers its forms within the landscapes: desolation or solitude, the disqui-

eting serenity of immensity uncovered. The second moment is that of the caprice: the fantasy that deforms, changes place, and condenses all of its images into the landscape. The frst moment is, strictly speaking, that of an Arcadian experience: no man’s land, crude earth, raw landscape; the second moment is that of remembered, fctitious, fantastical elaboration of a paradise.

The Lacunary Caprice of Landscape

How is a landscape formed, in terms of representation? How has the defnition of landscape evolved through its images? Perhaps through a procedure akin to cinematic montage, in which many elements come into play, some of which are in apparent opposition. Intervening in this way in Post’s early landscape painting is not only the object of representation, that alterity of landscape painting, that “other,” (as yet) unrepresented American landscape; there is also intervention from Post’s own place of origin and the production therein. In Post’s landscapes we can see the superimposition and melding of northern Europe, with its fat lands and low horizons, as a prior model, with what was still the non-place of Brazilian land. What they have in common is that the randomness of that montage is precisely the construction of a new place as landscape.

I would argue that the places constructed in landscape have a lacunary nature. Post’s landscapes painted after returning to Holland respond to the loss of a landscape through the distance of return: thus, that landscape is merely a lacuna or gap in memory. Representation, from a distance, doubly distanced (spatially in the landscape and mimetically in its faithful appearance) is thus destined to fulfll this lacuna in landscape painting. As an invention that inevitably becomes detached from reality, the representation of landscape proceeded, from its American founding by Frans Post in European lands distant from the Americas. It meant, therefore, the construction of an absent locale, its reinvention.

We must consider Post’s secondary, delayed gaze from Holland, which is the founding gaze of the landscape in the Americas. The texture of this founding—and the texture of the “capricious” invention of place that it implies—is precisely distance itself. Daniel Arrasse, in an insightful text on the spaces of perspective and the place of landscape, has demonstrated that the emergence of landscape painting in Italy depended to a large degree on the articulation of a double distance: landscape appears as distant when observed from the city’s architecture;

Frans Post (1612–1680), Netherlands, Brazilian Landscape with Manoah’s Sacrifce, 1648, oil on canvas, 193 × 167 cm (76 × 65 O inches), courtesy Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

the city’s architecture is blurred by the distances that landscape represents. 11 Therefore, the specifc operation of the landscape consists in “bringing the faraway closer.” “Landscape, as distance relative to the city, therefore constitutes the privileged place for the emergence of the unexpected, the bizarre, the irrational, the monstrous.”12

It is precisely this distance that—as with the deserts in his frst landscapes—acquires in Post a particular succinctness, transcending the statutes of a theoretical construction. The distance of the American landscape that Post brings closer in his works is not only a speculative distance—nature that exists beyond human drawings—but it is also a spatial distance and a distance in memory. Thus it might be thought that Post’s landscapes painted in Holland are the result of the impossibility of bringing together the landscape being represented and the gaze that—by deforming it—invents that landscape. But at the same time, this distance is for Post—unlike for the other painters of his school—the very site for the fourishing of the “unexpected” and the “bizarre” that comprise the American landscape from a European point of view. Insofar as Post is the paradigm and originator of the landscape in the Americas, the time of foundation was the time of the caprice: fantasies representing the bizarre and, fundamentally, a matter of forging new paths.

It was in this way that another treatise-writer, one of Federico Zuccaro’s disciples, described the painter of caprices: “these are comparable to goats, because they take the most difcult paths, inventing new concepts and thinking at a high level, beyond the bounds of the

usual and normal, along new pathways, seeking throughout mountains and valleys, at the expense of great efort, new grass on which to feed; this is something that is not done by the sheep, always calmly following, to which copyists have been compared. That is why the painter’s new concept came to be known as ‘Caprices.’”13

We could invoke this metaphor of undiscovered pathways in our analysis of the invention of the landscape in the Americas by Frans Post. Repeating the abrupt voyage of discovery, consuming the oceanic distance that separates Europe from America, Post opens himself up to discovering this unknown land with raw perplexity and later, like a goat, he invents new paths with his landscape caprices. Thus, as he disconnects from observed reality, he constructs a visual legend of the tropics. From the European metropolis, with his memory compensating for the absence of his subject, he approaches the distant lands of the Americas with his caprices, bringing it nearer and also making it a potential land for stories. Working against distance and forgetting, this landscape painting comes to supplant with its leafy exuberance the straightforward, desert-like quality of his frst landscapes. A work of alteration, of fction, this landscape would thus be an other place of the landscape, the precise image of its alterity.

Silence and the Aura of Landscape

The double foundational temporality of this process of stripping down representation (in the original landscapes) and of dressing them up again in legend, caprice, deformity, and eloquence (in the secondary landscapes), might well have been established by theoretically based legends that comprise an archaeology of landscape for the Western critical tradition. The frst is established by Philostratus, the author of Eikones and inventor of the descriptive genre.

In fact, the ninth chapter of Eikones (or Imagines) contains what is perhaps the oldest known landscape in the Western tradition. And like every original landscape we will say that it never existed, that it is an invention, a “caprice,” a fction. As with each and every one of the paintings that Philostratus describes, we are faced with a verbal fantasy. The inventor of description conceives of sixty-fve fctitious paintings among which one, somberly titled “The Swamp,” seems uncannily like a landscape, is ultimately described as an accumulation of nominal presences without narrative drive where the accidental inclination of some trees functions as a slippery bridge allowing its crossing. It would even seem as if the Greek author had seen, a thousand years before

Frans Post (1612–1680), Netherlands, View of Olinda, Brazil, 1662, oil on canvas, 107.5 × 172.5 cm (42 E⁄af × 68 inches), Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Post, landscapes divested of narrative with their silent riverbanks, dry and stark views, but at the same time those “caprices” conceived by the traveling Dutchman after his voyage to Brazil, flled with fgures that dance throughout the entire space without narrative articulation. Michelangelo, as documented by Francisco de Holanda, refected critically on the northern European landscape tradition: “The Flemish paint in order to refect external life. This type of painting consists of memories: old houses, green countryside, the shade of the trees, some bridges and streams. This is called landscape painting, in which some small fgurines can also be found. Pleasing to certain eyes, it is undertaken entirely without reason, without art, without symmetry, without proportion, without thought, without selection, without any certainty of what is being done; in sum, without any idea, without any strength.”14 According to Michelangelo, then, landscape is an attack on the rigor of pictorial thought. Like the swamp in the ninth chapter of Eikones, everything in it is “slippery,” including its meaning. Faced with the impossibility of designating a unifed meaning, Philostratus thus attempts a simple enumeration of images: reliefs, animals, birds, clouds, rocks, trees, bark, wells, streams, ivy, vines, “lively and capricious” goats. Beyond enumeration, beyond the desperate attempt to “invent” a fctional narrative, landscape emerges, in its original images, in its frst originating invention, as a setback in discourse, as a rupture in meaning, contaminated by the unnamable “aura” of an absolute silence.15

The ninth chapter of Eikones thus embodies a model of the exhaustion of discourse, of the collapse of narrative whose symptom—and even perhaps whose cause—would be the apparent innocence of landscape. A “slippery” site, the humid place of marshy lands that the Greek rhetorician hopelessly attempts to reduce to the narrative description that his text standardizes: each painting a scene, each scene a story, each story a fable, each fable a moral, each moral a myth. With the precise and strategic exception of this swamp, this dark source of waters and difculties flled with animals and plants, with things that, at any rate, have no narrative thread stringing them together to ofer sense or coherence. Description ceases, then, with the enumeration of the fgures that make it up. Landscape arises from a sort of regression to the nascent state of the world, when the entire cosmos could be summarized as a succession of apparitions, of things that arose one after another, ofering in their accumulation a sort of condensation of time, that other form of fction.

However, like any founding gesture, this parable of incomprehension, the Greek parable of that suspension of meaning with its consequential enumerative exhaustion of discourse illustrated in Philostratus’s ninth chapter, will only become intelligible afterward: at the time of another legend and another, postponed, gesture of critical founding. Many centuries later, around the time that Frans Post was supplanting his distant memories of the Brazilian landscape with luxuriant tropical caprices, British artist and writer Edward Norgate proposed the story of another (theoretical) invention of landscape. In 1650 Norgate wrote:

The frst time, according to what I was told abroad, it happened in this way. A Gentleman of Antwerpe being a great lover of art returning from a long Journey he had made about the Countrey of Liege and Forrest of Ardenna, comes to visit his old friend, an ingenious painter of that Citie, whose House and Company he useually frequented. The Painter he fnds at his Easill—at worke—which he very diligently intends, while his newcome friend, walking by, recountes the adventures of his long Journey, and with all what Cities he saw, what beautiful prospects he beheld in a country of a strange Scitation, full of Alpine rocks, old Castles, and extraordinary buildings, etc. With which relation (growing long) the prompt and ready painter was soe delighted as, unregarded by his walking friend, he layes by his worke, and on a new Table begins to paint what the other spake, describing his description in a more legible and lasting character then the others words. In short by that time the Gentleman had ended his long discourse, the Painter had brought his worke to that perfection, as the Gentelman at parting, by chance casting his eye that way, was astonisht with wonder to see those places and that Countrey soe lively exprest by the Painter as if hee had scene with his eyes. . . .16

Norgate’s legend brings together three fundamental traits which are articulated in the descriptive enigmas of Philostratus, and in Post’s contemporary landscape caprices: a country (still) without name that someone describes (“a country of a strange Scitation”) an operative defnition of landscape (“a description of the description”) and the inadvertent gaze that uncovers it (“by chance casting his eye that way”). But above all, what Norgate’s legend implies without saying so is that, out of all the adventures narrated by that traveler, the painter represented only the scenic frame, his country of “strange Scitation,” the stripped-down and stark background. Landscape, the “original

landscape” would be that: a land without name, devoid of narrative, a muted terrain that ofers itself up to a silent eye, the universe dispossessed of its adventures, prior to all history or even without it, as a local, topological testimony of its simple and stark potential.

However, we should not think of this “silent plain” of landscape in opposition to the eloquence of Post’s landscape caprices. When declaring that Post used the luxuriance of his caprices to make up for the loss of a landscape that he had initially represented with stark and muted images, this is not meant to imply that his later works contradict the silent, muted nature of landscape. His caprices are silent as well; their eloquence is purely visual, accumulated in his images. From the twilight of his life, Frans Post redresses representation with a legendary fction, cultivating in his landscapes the totality of objects, accidents, and variations that comprise them. For Post, as for his contemporaries, landscape is a silent operative for representation. But unlike his contemporaries, Post’s later landscapes seem marked by a desire for totality, an emblematic accumulation of fgures dispersed throughout the immensity of the tropical spaces, comparable only to the disarticulated voice of Philostratus repeating the names of each of the things that inhabit his swamps.

Historically, landscape could be characterized as the operation of turning an eloquent, rhetorical type of painting into a spatial, fat, muted type of painting. That is where the narratives that regulated its practice for centuries fall silent. Norgate’s legend has the virtue of describing the emergence of landscape through a voice that is silenced within, and of establishing it conceptually as that visual silence which transcends and exceeds it. If the meaning of the aura is a form of radiance without words, a substance that belongs to things beyond their names, then it would have to be said that landscape has an aura. It should not be surprising, then, that the actual scenario through which Walter Benjamin proposed the defnition of the aura was a landscape. A literary scene of landscape in which the German philosopher established, along with his defnition of the “aura,” the very operation of landscape: coming closer, bringing the faraway near, through representation.

That which has no name and possesses only images—the landscape— can thus be seen from a distance as a desert or as a caprice, as an empty place or as a remembered aggregate of all its variations. “We defne the aura of [a natural object] as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch

which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”17 The young Frans Post, on board the sailing ship Mauricio, forever leaving behind the memorable riverbanks of the Americas, carries inscribed upon him, as shadows, all of the images of landscape.

1 The present text is an edited version of an essay titled “Landscape and Foundation: Frans Post and the Invention of the American Landscape,” in XXIV Bienal de São Paulo. Núcleo histórico: antropofagia e histórias de canibalismo (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1998), 107–110. A slightly diferent complete version was also published as “Frans Post, Invençao e aura da paisagem,” in O Brasil e os Holandeses, ed. Paulo Herkenhof (Rio de Janeiro: Sextante, 1999), 218–237.

2 See Alain Roger, Court traité du paysage (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 16–30.

3 Frederica in Paraíba, known before the Dutch domination as Felipéia, in honor of Phillip IV of Spain, is today the city of João Pessoa.

4 “The Vocal Nymph, resounding Echo, near—/ She that speaks not herself, but silence breaks/ With repetitive sound of him that speaks/ . . .” See Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, 353–388.

5 See Gustav Carus, Nine Letters on Landscape Painting (1835) (Madrid: Visor, 1992), 110–116.

6 “Frans Post is the only known Dutch painter to have been employed full time to record and depict landscapes.” Peter C. Sutton, Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1987), 411.

7 Sigmund Freud, L’homme Moïse et la religion monothéiste: Trois essais (1939) (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).

8 Ibid., 115.

9 These images are schematic to the extent that during the eighteenth century, when an unknown copyist called Thierry proceeded to reproduce these landscapes in the form of drawings, he allowed himself to “correct” them, to add characters to certain scenes, relocate others, etc.

10 See Louis Marin, Philippe de Champaigne ou la présence cachée (Paris: Hazan, 1995), 36–37.

11 Daniel Arrasse, “L’espace de la perspective el le lieu du paysage,” unpublished.

12 Daniel Arrasse, “Lorenzo Lotto dans ses bizarreries: le peintre et l’iconographie,” in Lorenzo Lotto: Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi per il V centenario della nascita (Treviso, 1981), note 24.

13 Vicente Carducho, Diálogos de la Pintura (1633) (Madrid: Turner, 1979), 157–158. Note the etymological link between the animal genre (caprino) and the name of the concept (capriccio).

14 Michelangelo Buonarroti, cited by Francisco de Holanda, Tractato de Pintura Antigua (1548), Academia de San Fernando, Madrid, 1921. See Anthony Blunt, La teoría de las artes en Italia 1450–1600 (1940) (Madrid: Cátedra, 1979), 78.

15 Philostratus, Eikonos o La Galerie de tableaux (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991) 23–25.

16 Edward Norgate, Miniatura or the Art of Limning (1650), cited by Ernst Gombrich, “La teoría del arte renacentista y el nacimiento del paisajismo,” in Norma y Forma (Madrid: Alianza, 1984), 243–244.

17 Walter Benjamin, “L’oeuvre d’art à l’ère de sa reproductibilité technique” in Essais (II, 1935–1940) (Paris: Denoël- Gonthier, 1983), 94.

frans post in the patricia phelps de cisneros collection

rafael romero d .

In addition to the writings produced by Alexander von Humboldt after his American sojourn, the arrival of the young Dutch painter Frans Post to Brazil at the beginning of the seventeenth century was another seminal moment in the development of the Latin American landscape genre. With him, easel painting ascends as a medium for representing American terrain, which had previously been documented only through prints and drawings. It is for this reason that the collection of landscapes of the Americas in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) begins chronologically with two oil paintings by Post: one executed upon his arrival to the New World, the other many years later in his native Holland.

Frans Post arrived in Recife, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco, in 1637, remaining there until 1644 as part of a commission led by John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen, Count and later Prince of Orange, also known as “the Brazilian.” Nassau had been appointed by the Dutch West Indies Company to govern the recently conquered colony, which was previously in the hands of the Portuguese. His commission also included scientists, cartographers, architects, and another painter, Albert Eckhout, who was responsible for painting the native population as well as local fora and fauna.

According to the information that is available, Post learned his trade from his brother Pieter, a painter who counts some landscapes in his body of work, and who is best known as one of the most prestigious architects in seventeenth-century Holland. It is quite possible that it is due to Pieter’s infuence that the young artist was contracted by the Count of Orange to provide faithful visual documentation of the nature of the Brazilian territories occupied by the Dutch. At just twenty-fve years of age, he was the frst European painter with a solid artistic formation to come to the New World, inaugurating a tradition of traveling artists in the Americas that would endure for centuries

The legacy of Post’s stay in Brazil comprises a group of paintings and innumerable drawings, many of which have now been lost; the latter functioned as a starting point for the production of a number of etchings. Thirty-three of these prints formed part of a book published by Caspar Barlaeus in Amsterdam in 1647, under the auspices of Maurice of Nassau- Siegen, in order to gather and disseminate the results of his mission to Brazil. 1

When the Count returned to Holland in 1644, he brought with him all of the paintings that the artist had created in Brazil. Years later, in 1679, he ofered to King Louis XIV of France forty-two paintings

by Frans Post and Albert Eckhout, including the eighteen that Post painted in northeastern Brazil. The majority of Post’s works would eventually disappear from the royal collections, due especially to the political turbulence of the French Revolution; the only seven surviving works from the Brazilian period can be found today in the Louvre in Paris, the Mauritshuis in the Hague, and important private collections throughout the world.

The two oil paintings in the CPPC correspond to two very distinct moments in Frans Post’s career. View of Frederica City in Paraíba was painted in Brazil in October of 1638, the year after his arrival to the Americas; Landscape with Chapel was produced some twenty-fve years later, after he had returned to Haarlem, his city of residence in the Low Countries. In the intervening period between the two, the majority of his artistic life had taken place. The years separating the respective genesis of the works unquestionably brought about stylistic changes in the artist’s work, and above all modifcations in his way of conceiving of the representation of the Brazilian landscape, the perennial theme of his paintings.

In 2006, researchers Pedro and Bia Corrêa do Lago published Frans Post (1612–1680): Obra Completa [Frans Post (1612–1680): Complete Works], which includes, in addition to analytical and historical texts, a detailed catalogue raisonné of all works ofcially attributed to the painter: one hundred ffty-fve paintings, ffty-nine drawings, and thirty-four etchings.2 The oil paintings registered in this cataloguing surpass the twenty that J. de Sousa Leão included in 1973, when he published the frst catalogue of the artist’s work.3

In the essay “Frans Post: vida y obra en cuatro etapas” [Frans Post: Life and Work in Four Stages], which is included in his Complete Works, the authors divide Post’s production into four periods. The frst phase (1637–44) includes seven surviving oil paintings of the presumed eighteen works created during the seven years the artist spent in Brazil . . . “these seven paintings are Frans Post’s most important works.” The second phase (1645–60) comprises forty works undertaken within the frst ffteen years after his return to Holland. The third phase (1661–69) encompasses sixty-nine works. “This short period of nine years is generally considered the artist’s most brilliant and prolifc period of production, when he was forty-nine to ffty-seven years of age.” The fourth phase (1670–80) includes thirty-nine paintings executed in the fnal years of his life, a production which is . . . “undoubtedly the most trifing, and which corresponds to period of clear artistic and personal decline.”4

View of Frederica City in Paraíba is identifed by the number four, meaning that chronologically it was the fourth work Post painted in Brazil. Landscape with Chapel bears the number sixty-fve, situating it within the third phase designated by the Corrêa do Lagos.

View of Frederica City in Paraíba depicts the small city of Nossa Senhora das Neves, located on a hill above the Paraíba River, founded in 1585 by the Portuguese. In 1588 it was known as Filippea, in honor of Philip II of Spain. During the Dutch occupation (1634–54) it received the denomination of City of Frederica (Frederickstad) in homage to Frederick Henry, who was then Prince of Orange. After 1654 it regained its original name and in 1939 its name was changed to João Pessoa, the capital of the Brazilian state of Paraíba. At the base of the settlement, on the bank of the river, the viewer can make out the convent of San Francisco, temporarily converted by the Dutch into the city’s fortifcations.

If a painting is meant to freeze one instant out of eternity onto canvas, Post takes this proposition to its furthest extreme in View of Frederica City in Paraíba by imbuing the pictorial space with the immanent quietude of the landscape. The gaze is that of an individual observing, in awe and for the frst time, the nature of the American tropics; the gaze of an individual contemplating nature in intimate solitude and in communion with it. As Souren Melikian observed, “No human being can be seen. Two trees evoke the idea of a vision of heaven on earth with their red and white fruits, dancing like lighted decorations in the festival of men. . . . In reality, that ‘urban view’ is rooted in the primordial void and the original state of harmony, as if Post were painting obsessed with the frst lines of Genesis.”5

There is no supplementary narration beyond the faithful, deliberate, and serene visual description of the city, the river, and nature. The painter ’s eyes look with ecstasy and exasperation over the beauty of this recently discovered object, which his work ennobles.

According to Luis Pérez-Oramas, “View of Frederica City in Paraíba,  . . . features . . . in an exemplary manner the great plane of water, which occupies the entire base of the work like an immense mirror. We might reference paintings like Vermeer’s renowned View of Delft, (see p. 33) a work that came twenty years after this one by Post, due to the almost airy refnement of the brushstrokes that sketch out the fortifcations at the river’s edge, as well as the subtle distinctions of terrain and the plant and animal forms duplicated in the refecting surface of the water.”6

Post creates the illusion of amplifed space in this depiction not only by using the refected image, a practice which he inherited from Flem-

ish painting, but also by using repoussoir, a tool he had learned from Baroque painting, the basis of his own artistic formation. Post situates a group of trees and animals in the foreground and to the right, so that from this point of reference the eye will take everything in and become lost in the depths of the space, until reaching the vast and cloud-flled sky. The view is taken from a considerable distance, permitting the artist to include a low and ample horizon in his composition.

Post breaks the rich and dense tropical green that barely covers a third of the work with the whites, reds, and yellows of the birds and fruits, along with the brick-colored tones of the roofs of the buildings in the town, including those refected in the water. The other two-thirds are occupied by the whites, grays, and soft blues with which he paints the sky, the clouds, and the river in which the sky is refected. It is worth noting that this sunless sky, heavily charged with clouds, is reminiscent of those we fnd in many Dutch landscapes painted by his contemporaries.

The painting’s multiple miniscule details are worthy of a careful reading, especially the fora and fauna represented on the right side. The viewer’s eye pauses on the diferent types and colors of birds, on the qualities and textures of the roots, trunks, leaves, and fruit of the trees, all of which display the artist’s acute capacity for observation and the precision of his brushstrokes. Without a doubt, the pictorial portrayal of this Eden-like scene ofers a veritable delight for the eyes. The painter’s signature stands out singularly, registered on the trunk of a thin palm tree, which bears the inscription: “F Post/ 1638/10/ 2(3?).”

In their Complete Works, Pedro and Bia Corrêa do Lago catalogued the print of View of Frederica City in Paraíba that was published in a book by Caspar Barlaeus. Certain details of this image difer from the painting, in particular the inclusion of human fgures within the composition. The authors also include a reproduction of a gouache produced by copyist Thiéry, which is more faithful to the original oil painting.7

Unlike View of Frederica City in Paraíba, Landscape with Chapel is a highly animated composition, with numerous human and animal fgures present. The scene represents a chapel attended by a group of faithful Dutch, as can be deduced from their clothing, accompanied by some locals, who are lined up in front of the main doorway. Farther back, on the right side of the work, there are seven fgures in lively dancing poses whose skin color and clothing allow us to deduce that they are black slaves.

Of particular imaginative interest is the presence of a group of exotic animals standing on the riverbed of a small stream of water that

occupies the foreground in the lower left corner of the painting. Within this tropical bestiary we can identify a couple of herons, whose feet are illuminated by a ray of late-afternoon light coming in from the left; as well as a pair of lizards, an anteater, and two armadillos, sheltered by the shade of the dense vegetation. The inclusion of these exuberant animals in the composition, along with the attractive bromelia fower in the center, appear to respond more to decorative intentions and the need to satisfy a European taste for the curious and the exotic, than to documentary concerns per se.

Referring to a non-specifed location of northeastern Brazil, this admirable composition is organized in fve successive planes, separated by blocks of vegetation. The dense foliage and the palm trees of the frst plane, along with the small church to the left, fulfll the function of repoussoir, utilized by Post in many of his works, and serve as the point of departure to open up into an extensive background. An impeccably constructed linear perspective with converging lines marked on the sides by the palm trees, buildings, and rolling hills, and in the center by the river, guide the eye toward a distant vanishing point situated upon the horizon. In the background, the tenuous and nearly transparent blues and grays of the remote mountains reafrm the illusion of depth in the landscape. The infnite and luminous sky, sunless and replete with clouds, occupies more than half of the work, as prescribed by seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting.

If Post’s works undertaken in Brazil fundamentally respond to his drive to register and describe landscape through direct observation, then in his later works painted in his studio, imagination, creativity, and memory play a more relevant role, particularly in those—like Landscape with Chapel—included in the third phase of Pedro and Bia Corrêa do Lago’s cataloguing. From the perspective of some authors, this tendency to “fantasize” the Brazilian landscape even leads Post to idealize certain cruel social practices such as slavery, which persisted for centuries in the Brazilian territories occupied by the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Dutch. In this sense, we must not lose sight of the fact that Post’s work was intended to fulfll a propagandistic function with regard to the glories of the Dutch colonization of the Americas and the victories of the Count of Orange’s mission and its sponsor, the Dutch West Indies Company.

“His heavenly landscapes,” as Tolga Erkam puts it, “should be considered as belonging to an imaginative oeuvre. The repetition of the same themes with varying combinations of similar visual elements

enables him to create a new Brazil. His painting represents a type of tropical paradise, perhaps echoing ancient myths that persisted since the time of Brazil’s discovery.”8 In other words, Post “constructs ‘the visual legend’ of the tropics,” as Luis Pérez-Oramas afrms.9

View of Frederica City in Paraíba and Landscape with Chapel permit us to access two important elements that converge in the work of Frans Post, as well as the work of hundreds of traveler artists who followed them: the rigorous documentation that faithfully registers the tropical nature of America and the fertile imagination and creativity that convert the American landscape into a beautiful, transcendent, and artistic subject.

(translated by phillip penix-tadsen)

1 The book’s complete title is: Rerum per octennium in Brasilia et alibi nuper gestarum, sub praefectura Ill. Comitis I. Mauritii, Nassaviae &c Comitis, nunc Vesaliae gubernatoris & equitatus Foederatorum Belgii Ordd. sub Auriaco ductoris, historia (History of Deeds Done in Eight Years in Brazil).

2 Pedro and Bia Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post (1612–1680): Obra completa (Rio de Janeiro: Capivara Ediciones, 2006). In 2007, an English-language version was published with the title Frans Post. 1612–1680: Catalogue Raisonné (Milan: Five Continents Editions, 2007).

3 Joaquim de Sousa Leão, Frans Post 1612–1680 (Amsterdam: A.L. Van Gendt & Co., 1973). Quoted in Pedro and Bia Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post, 12. (Author’s translation from Portuguese to Spanish).

4 All citations are taken from Pedro and Bia Corrêa, Frans Post, 83, 113, 192, and 296. (Author’s translation from Portuguese to Spanish.)

5 Souren Melikian, Startling Originality of a Dutch Painter, quoted in Pedro and Bia Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post, 98. (Author’s translation from Portuguese to Spanish.)

6 Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas, “Breviario de paisajes” (Landscape Compendium). Working paper, (Caracas, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, 1998), n.p.

7 Pedro and Bia Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post, 98.

8 Tolga Erkan, “Paisagem imaginários de Frans Post/The imaginary landscapes of Frans Post,” Re de Humanidades (Departamento de História, Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil) 13, no. 3 (2012): 92.

9 Luis Pérez-Oramas, “Landscape and Foundation: Frans Post and the Invention of the American landscape,” in XXIV Bienal de São Paulo. Nucleo histórico: antropofagia e histórias de canibalismos (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1998), 106.

Frans Post (1612–1680), Netherlands

View of Frederica City in Paraíba, 1638 Oil on canvas, 61 × 87.3 cm (24 × 34 W inches)

Frans Post (1612–1680), Netherlands

Landscape with Chapel, c. 1663

Oil on canvas, 43.5 × 58.7 cm (17 V × 23 V inches)

geography

valley of meXico caracas and environs

caribbean and central america ports and seascapes the

valley of meXico

The Valley of Mexico is an iconic site. There the ancient Mexican people founded their capital of Tenochtitlán in 1325 on an island in Lake Texcoco, where—according to the prophecy of the god Huitzilopochtli— they found an eagle perched on a prickly pear devouring a serpent (a symbol which appears today on the national fag). It continued to be the seat of power of New Spain during the Spanish colonial era, and the capital of the independent nation. In the nineteenth century, this highlands plateau basin in central Mexico was regarded as one of the world’s great natural spectacles. Alexander von Humboldt deemed Mexico City, the valley’s centerpiece, “undoubtedly one of the fnest cities ever built by Europeans in either hemisphere” set in a locale that “brings to mind the most beautiful lakes and mountains in Switzerland.”1

It was perhaps this afnity between the picturesque features of the lakes and mountains of the Valley of Mexico and the European cities from which many traveler artists came that gave these artists the opportunity to highlight the exotic plants and animals of this new land in the classic landscape tradition of European origin.

All of the artists featured in this section were trained by teachers steeped in the classical tradition of landscape exemplifed by artists such as Claude and Poussin. This training allowed the traveler artists the ability to translate the clarity, vigor, and directness of European landscape traditions onto a uniquely Mexican landscape. Consistent emphasis on fora such as palm trees, the ubiquitous symbol of the tropics, and cacti, the plant in the center of the myth that led the Aztecs to found their capital city in the Valley of Mexico, demonstrates artists’ interest in accentuating the exotic nature of Mexico’s landscape. However, the broad vistas of the valley that parallel contemporary European landscape paintings exhibit the artists’ appreciation for the landscape, as their work depicts Mexico as an equal to Europe in its beauty and vastness.

Typical of the traveler artists, many of these works doubled as aesthetic objects and visual documentation of this foreign land. Some artists, such as Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros, were explicit in their aims, including text to make clear the identity of points of interest. Other artists, such as Johann Moritz Rugendas and Conrad Wise Chapman, were subtle yet clear in their aims, documenting both native plants such as cacti and maguey, and native peoples with relative fdelity to convey to their audience Mexico’s unique landscape. José María Velasco, a Mexican painter, documented the Valley of Mexico with the aim of making the Mexican landscape a symbol of national iden-

tity, depicting the valley to recall the legacy of the pre-Columbian civilizations that populated the region long before the colonization of the land. Regardless of their outlook, the imagery and composition of these images reveal the myriad aims of the artists representing the Valley of Mexico.

The similarities of these images in composition and style demonstrate that the legacy of the European tradition of landscape painting extended far beyond the lakes and mountains of Switzerland. However, these paintings simultaneously reveal the interest traveler artists shared in creating a new tradition of landscape painting in the Latin American idiom. The images of the Valley of Mexico encouraged viewers the world over to appreciate the landscape of Mexico as its own unique environment, and inspired later generations of artists to depict the land on its own terms.

erika nelson

1 Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of Mexico or New Spain (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811), 2:29.

José María Velasco

These landscapes by Mexican artist José María Velasco all present views of the Valley of Mexico, the painter’s most iconic motif. The words of Mexican modernist poet Carlos Pellicer perfectly describe that site’s cultural signifcance: he called the valley “one of the major phenomena in the history of our planet,” the “theatre for the presentation of vast and manifold geological dramas,” and the surface on which “ heaven and earth have written, in a fne, frm hand, the sounding account of an epic treatise on landscaping.”1 Velasco’s decades-long dedication to painting the site from diferent vantage points and in various media testifes not only to the valley’s geological splendor but also to its historic draw as the birthplace of several pre-Columbian civilizations, including the Toltec and Aztec, as well as the site of presentday Mexico City.

Of the four works, three are seemingly traditional renditions of the landscape: the earliest ofers a panoramic view of the snow-topped volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl rendered with broad swatches of color and scarce detail, in oil (1875); the second is a delicate pencil sketch made from La Viga (1884), the name of both a road and canal that used to connect Mexico City with smaller lake towns like Xochimilco; and a third depicts a view of the valley from the vantage point of Tacubaya (c. 1895), featuring a verdant foreground, a sliver of village in the center, and a mountain range behind it. The fourth work shows a waterborne tornado on lake Texcoco, largest of the fve lakes that once populated the Valley of Mexico but no longer exist.2 Difering greatly from Velasco’s others, this oil painting is a vertical, postcard–sized picture presenting a spewing tower of air that flls the top of the work with a matte dark-gray mass, against a blue, clear sky, with a low horizon line. Its hues of muted mauve and light blue also represent a departure from Velasco’s usual palette of greens, ochres, and browns. Nonetheless, considered as a group, the four works showcase not only the painter’s diverse geographical approaches, but also his fuency with diferent aesthetic approaches.

The small scale of these works notably contrasts Velasco’s bestknown paintings, particularly his 1875 landscape Valley of Mexico, which measured 1.60 by 2.27 meters and was exhibited in Philadelphia in 1876 at the Centennial Exhibition. It is likely that the smaller works were made on site, as the modest format was more suited to painting outdoors. In fact, from the beginning of his training, plein air painting was fundamental for Velasco. Under the rigorous instruction of the Italian landscape master Eugenio Landesio (1810–1879) at the Acad-

Valley of Mexico from La Viga, 1884

View of Tacubaya, c. 1895 Waterspout from Lake Texcoco, 1875 Valley of Mexico, 1875

emy of San Carlos, the young painter would have been required to draw directly from nature.

These modestly sized compositions also exemplify fundamental diferences between Velasco, as a local artist, and the many European and American traveler artists who were painting Latin American vistas during the nineteenth century. Velasco foregoes conventions of the picturesque or sublime, which were at the time almost part and parcel of the artist-travelers’ toolkit. To be fair, the Valley of Mexico did not ofer the same exotic and lush vegetation that painters encountered along the Magdalena River or the jungles of Brazil, but Velasco also chose not to paint the valley bathed in the soft pink light of a seductive sunset nor did he depict the volcanoes as dominating the landscape. While Velasco’s mountains in many ways resemble those of landscape painters from the United States, including Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, “  . . . he never indulges in theatrics of a ‘Wagnerian’ or ‘Baroque’ character as they do. While Church and Bierstadt were . . . overawed by the exoticism of unfamiliar mountain scenery or the strange newness of the West . . . to Velasco such material was normal and he accepted and treated it scientifcally.”3

Rather than considering these works merely as preparatory or preliminary sketches for Velasco’s larger, majestic paintings, they in fact reveal a diferent side of the artist and of his approach to landscape; in these instances, he forgoes the need for grandeur and exuberance, opting instead for a looser hand and a more direct engagement with the familiar geography. Through this straightforward approach, Velasco reveals a modern sensibility in his lack of attachment to a particular format or formula for his compositions. In his framing of the sky alone—with shifting horizon lines across vertical and horizontal compositions—Velasco quietly exhibits his technical versatility as well as his unique, locally shaped point of view.

paula kupfer

1 Carlos Pellicer, “The Valley of Mexico,” in José María Velasco, 1840–1912 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1944), 11.

2 Alfred P. Maudslay, “The Valley of Mexico,” The Geographical Journal 48, no. 1 (July 1916): 11–23.

3 Henry Cliford, “Note on Velasco’s Paintings,” in José María Velasco, 1840–1912 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1944), 15–16.

José María Velasco (1840–1912), Mexico Valley of Mexico from La Viga, 1884

Graphite on paper, 16 × 23 cm (6 E⁄af × 9 A⁄af inches)

José María Velasco (1840–1912), Mexico

View of Tacubaya, c. 1895

Oil on canvas, 27.9 × 41.9 cm (11 × 16 K inches)

José María Velasco (1840–1912), Mexico

Waterspout from Lake Texcoco, 1875

Oil on wood, 14 × 9 cm (5 K × 3 I⁄af inches)

José María Velasco (1840–1912), Mexico Valley of Mexico, 1875

Oil on canvas, 16 × 44 cm (6 E⁄af × 17 E⁄af inches)

Johann Moritz Rugendas

Johann Moritz Rugendas, a traveler artist from Bavaria, began his stay in Mexico during the month of July 1831, in the port of Veracruz. After an intense journey in the tropical territories of the eastern Sierra Madre, toward the end of that same year, the artist settled in the capital. He then worked for two years as a traveling artist in Mexico City and its surroundings. He undertook more or less extended excursions to Cuernavaca and the pre-Hispanic ruins of Xochicalco, to the north of the mining area of Pachuca, where he visited the then-famous Hacienda de Regla. He also made drawings and paintings of the diverse motifs the capital ofered him, both of the Valley of Mexico and its immediate surroundings, including the population, its richly multicolored clothing, and popular festivals. At the time, Rugendas engaged with personalities of the country’s social and political spheres, and even established relations that ended up compromising him politically. During those years, there was strong political turbulence and instability in Mexico, dominated by the authoritarian fgure of General Antonio López de Santa Anna. In these circumstances, the young foreign painter paid for his audacious meddling in domestic political issues with a period in jail. When he managed to be acquitted of his charges, he chose to leave the capital and traveled westward to the Pacifc Ocean, where he embarked for South America from the port of Manzanillo.

During his entire stay in Mexico, Rugendas regularly employed the technique of the oil sketch, a type of painting that was quickly made, sometimes in situ, or, with more time, in his atelier, based on observational drawings of nature. In fact, the Mexican oeuvre by the traveler artist contains several hundred oil studies on cardboard of relatively small dimensions—15 to 20 cm high by 25 to 30 cm long. The artist sent a selection of these works to his mentor Alexander von Humboldt, in Berlin; others he kept as part of the repertory he took with him when he continued his journey.1

Based on these studies, Rugendas composed some medium and large paintings, such as the View of the Valley of Mexico with Volcanoes and the Texcoco Lake. These paintings are made with care and are compositions of complex construction, with plenty of details both of nature and of aspects of the inhabitants’ daily life. Like other artworks of this type in those years, these paintings were made to be sold or used to recompense acts of kindness and favors to friends and acquaintances. They were the artist’s main means of subsistence during his American journey.

View of the Valley of Mexico ofers a broad view of the altiplano of the capital, as seen from the west and stretching over the valley, partially

of the Valley of Mexico with Volcanoes and the Texcoco Lake, c. 1833

showing the Texcoco Lake to the left and the so-called volcanillos—the little volcanoes—to the right. In the background, at more than 5,000 meters tall, rise the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl.

The painting is painstakingly constructed. Standing out in the foreground above all else are a series of enormous sisals and some nopals, typical of the geographic location, and a small group of local people, dressed in multicolored attire; several suburban constructions appear in the background of this scene. The city lies in the center of the valley, while the volcanoes and mountain range in the back serve as monumental scenographic decor. Each one of these motifs is highlighted adequately through a careful alternation of light and shadows that gradually leads the eye of the observer through this territory and its geographic and human attractions.

The emphasis the painter puts on the emblematic volcanoes is more noticeable as the horizon is relatively low. On the other hand, this allows for the inclusion of the sky as an important element; it is partially clouded, with soft tones of transparent blue.

Rugendas dedicated an important amount of medium and largesized compositions to the Valley of Mexico. With them, the artist contributed to the creation of an iconographic tradition of depicting this territory which, as years went by, became representative of the identity of the country as a whole. In fact, toward the second half of the nineteenth century, for all landscape painters—be they travelers or not— the great volcanoes of the valley of the capital became essential motifs in their oeuvre.2

pablo diener

1 For Rugendas’s technique, see Pablo Diener, Rugendas: Imágenes de México. exh. cat., Museo Nacional de Historia, Castillo de Chapultepec, Mexico City (Augsburg: Wissner Verlag, 1994).

2 See Rugendas’s catalogue raisonné in Pablo Diener, Rugendas, 1802–1858 (Augsburg: Wissner Verlag, 1997).

View

Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858), Germany

View of the Valley of Mexico with Volcanoes and the Texcoco Lake, c. 1833 Oil on canvas, 70.2 × 93 cm (27 X × 36 X inches)

Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros

This selection of works by French diplomat and artist Baron JeanBaptiste Louis Gros provides excellent examples of plein air landscape painting. The loosely applied paint and written notes in View of Texcoco and The Volcanoes, in contrast to the meticulously fnished canvas of The Valley of Cuautla, suggest that the works are sketches from direct observation in the feld and intended to be used as references for future paintings. The practice of in situ observation became increasingly common with the emergence of the fgure of the traveling artist. The result was a genre of landscape painting inspired by the spirit of travel and an “in the moment” understanding of the natural world. The works of Baron Gros include illuminating instances of this genre. Although not formally trained as an artist, Gros was an avid observer of culture and terrain, and throughout his travels he experimented with creative documentation.1

As a diplomat, Baron Gros traveled extensively. He was frst posted to Lisbon and then Egypt, and was later appointed First Secretary of the French Legation in Mexico (1832–36). Gros subsequently served in Brazil from 1836 to 1838 and in Colombia from 1839 to 1842. In his later career, he was Ambassador to China in 1857 and to London in 1862. He died in Ivry-sur- Seine in 1870.

In his artistic practice, Gros employed scientifc illustration in the tradition of Alexander von Humboldt. The artist’s commitment to both the physical and historical character of a place is demonstrated in the two oil sketches View of Texcoco and The Volcanoes. In View of Texcoco the artist represents a hacienda in the region surrounding Lake Texcoco. On the edges of the painting, inscribed directly on the paper, he notes the distance of the site from Mexico City, identifes the owner of the hacienda, and records the location of the wheat barns.

In The Volcanoes, there is a church in the left foreground, and on the sides there are a few low houses among the trees. In the distance rise two majestic snowy volcanoes: the conical peak of Popocatépetl on the right, and Iztaccíhuatl on the left. In the upper third of this unfnished work, directly on the paper, the artist has made several inscriptions. In these, Gros notes the name of each volcano in the native language, along with their altitudes and sulfuric levels. The notes also mention that the conquistador Hernán Cortés made his triumphant 1519 entrance into the Valley of Mexico between the two volcanoes. The silhouettes of the volcanoes, as seen from the Valley of Mexico, became an iconic image for traveler artists. The sketch, painted circa 1833–34, coincides with a time when Gros was particularly captivated by the volcanoes.

Valley of Cuautla, 1833

View of Texcoco, c. 1833–34

The Volcanoes, c. 1833–34

In 1834 he joined the English painter Daniel Thomas Egerton and the Prussian diplomat and scientist Baron Federico von Geroldt on an ascent of Popocatépetl. In his account of the expedition, Gros emphasizes the scientifc character of the enterprise, describing several instruments they took with them: a barometer, diferent types of thermometers, and a telescope, among others.2 The oil sketch of the volcanoes reproduced here, along with this expedition, likely informed a painting Gros completed in 1834, also titled The Volcanoes.3

There are only thirteen other documented paintings of Mexico by Gros.4 As with the two sketches discussed, these paintings demonstrate Gros’s desire to document what he saw. However, unlike his in situ work, Gros’s studio paintings convey the mood of a place. In the painting The Valley of Cuautla, two rocky hills emerge from semi-desert plains. The view likely depicts the archeological site of Chalcatzingo, with the Valley of Cuautla in the background to the right. We also see a trench that divides the landscape and curves back, extending toward the valley in the distance. This dangerous feature, coupled with the protruding rocky mounds, makes the landscape appear unfamiliar and possibly treacherous. An isolated blooming agave plant looms in the foreground, its stem curving slightly toward the geological elements featured in the painting. This isolated plant, warm light, and the surprising geography all work together in creating a picturesque vista that intrigues the viewer with an entirely unfamiliar place.

1 Gros was one of the pioneers of the daguerreotype. He learned of the technique in the 1840s while in Colombia. Intrigued by the detail that could be captured through photographic images, he practiced this process during his travels. He was a founding member of the Société Héliographique, the frst photographic society, and a regular contributor to La Lumière.

2 Pablo Diener, “Profle of the Traveler-Artist in the Nineteenth Century,” in European Traveler-Artists in Nineteenth-Century Mexico, eds. Cándida Fernández de Calderón, Alberto Sarmiento, and Pablo Diener (Mexico City: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 1996), 63–85.

3 This painting is in the art collection of the Banco Nacional de México

4 Manuel Romero de Terreros, El Baron Gros y sus vistas de México (México: Imprenta Universitaria, 1953).

sara meadows

Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros (1793–1870), France Valley of Cuautla, 1833

Oil on canvas, 45.7 × 58.4 cm (18 × 23 inches)

Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros (1793–1870), France

View of Texcoco, c. 1833–34

Oil on paper, 33.7 × 58.4 cm (13 N × 23 inches)

Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros (1793–1870), France

The Volcanoes, c. 1833–34 Oil on paper, 32.4 × 57.2 cm (12 O × 22 K inches)

Conrad Wise Chapman

Conrad Wise Chapman’s The Valley of Mexico demonstrates the breadth of his artistic inspirations, while the miniature scale and fne detailing exhibit his ability to apply the artistic skills developed during his youth in Italy to the landscape of Mexico. Chapman is one of the frst American artists to paint the Mexican landscape, and this image— painted four years after his travels frst brought him to Mexico—reveals his passion for Mexico’s landscape that would inspire him to return here throughout his life.

Despite its extremely small size, the painting exhibits the fnish typical of a large-scale work. Combining a genre scene with landscape painting, Chapman paid close attention to both the everyday scenes of Mexican life, and the majestic scenery of the Valley of Mexico. In the foreground, families relax in front of a hut, including a man who indulges in a siesta against a hay bale. Inside the hut, women are busy cooking. Chapman took care to depict each step of the tortilla making process, as one woman mashes corn in a bowl, another rolls out meal into fat tortillas, and a third woman cooks tortillas over the fre. Framing the scene are two plants typically associated with Mexico, the cactus and the palm tree, emphasizing the exotic nature of the setting and placing the proceedings frmly in the Mexican landscape. If there was any doubt of the location of the scene, a red tower on a hill behind the hut fies the Mexican fag.

The overt symbols of Mexico were likely included to distinguish this image from the countless paintings of rural Campagna in Italy that were created by his father, John Gadsby Chapman. The Chapman family moved to Europe when Conrad was four years old, settling in Rome in 1850. By the end of the decade, both Conrad and his brother were producing and selling landscapes and images of the most popular attractions in Rome, while their father sold paintings of rural Campagna to American tourists. The parallels between John’s paintings of the Campagna and Conrad’s image of the Valley of Mexico are irrefutable. John’s 1867 Harvesting on the Campagna, which Conrad would likely have seen upon his return to Rome in 1866, is the rural Italian version of Conrad’s painting. Both images feature a group of fgures in the left foreground next to a simple shelter, a sleeping fgure leaning against a bale of hay, and a group of men driving horses in the right foreground. In the background, both scenes depict a sweeping mountain landscape, demonstrating the Chapmans’ aptitude for successfully combining fgurative and landscape scenes, and the prolonged infuence of John on his son.

The Valley of Mexico, 1870

His inclusion of the lake in Conrad’s image diferentiates his image from his father’s, and the exposure to this sweeping view of the valley likely stemmed from a chance commission in 1866 to paint the tile factory of English engineer W. R. Jolly. As Laura Seager Chapman, Conrad’s second wife, described the experience years later:

[Jolly] took Chapman to the spot, near the hills that form part of the range of mountains that surround the valley of Mexico; the magnifcent “Valley of Mexico” was developing itself under the astonished regards of Chapman; the factory was only a prosaic point in the splendid landscape; and he chose the place called the “Olivar de los Padres,” [the Priests’ Olive Grove] to try his skill, not on the factory, but on the whole part of the valley that could be taken from the spots he had chosen.1

This view of the landscape moved Chapman to remain at the site for several days, chronicling the scene in a variety of smaller versions. As Chapman would later write to his father, “Mexico is the most thoroughly picturesque country I ever was in. The mountain scenery surpasses anything I have seen before.”2 Although Jolly’s commission was complete in 1866, Chapman returned to his oil and watercolor sketches of the Mexican landscape throughout his life.

Numerous works Chapman completed in the following years demonstrate his fondness for the Mexican landscape, regardless of his location or circumstances. This image may have been painted in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. After his stay in Rome, Chapman traveled to Paris to study with Gérôme, and was consequently trapped there during the war. The small scale and fne detailing of the image suggest that Chapman may have painted this for sale to tourists, similar to works he produced decades prior when he lived in Rome. Although Chapman was not in Mexico when he painted this image, it is clear that the Mexican landscape left a lasting impression on him. Wherever his travels took him, Chapman continued to reference the most picturesque place he had ever seen: the Valley of Mexico.

erika nelson

1 Laura Seager Chapman, “Memoir of the Life of Conrad Wise Chapman,” August 1920, typescript, Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia.

2 Letter to John Gadsby Chapman, July 13, 1865.

Conrad Wise Chapman (1842–1910), United States

The Valley of Mexico, 1870

Oil on wood, 13.3 × 20.3 cm (5 N × 8 inches)

caracas and environs

When considered in succession, as the formation of a sequence, these views of the environs of Caracas—which were captured, for the most part, by the skillful pencil of a very young Camille Pissarro at the midpoint of the nineteenth century—could be said to represent the story of a city as told visually from its margins, in the minor notes and picturesque details of the rural periphery, arriving progressively to its concentration of urban mass, luminous and white, like a handful of shimmering scales spread out along the length of a valley at the foot of an imposing mountain.

Examined in this way, this collection of images can guide us toward a reading that is both historical and pictorial, temporal and visual, of a city that is uneasily defned amongst the unresolved borders that separate fertile countryside and virginal nature from the well-delineated colonial city with its grid of blocks and its streets laid out in straight lines, its ceramic roofs and its whitewashed walls, its plazas, and its modest towers.

Pissarro’s rural views, sketched en plein air, with their restless and lively character, have the lightness and transparency of sketches with no greater ambition than their provisional nature as drafts. In this sense, they are beautiful and subtle approximations that confgure a type of threshold that transmits, through diferent perspectives and visual connections, the overall body of the organized city.

Outstanding among the ensemble of pieces by this painter is the single oil painting, exceptional among the pencil and ink drawings that precede it. A wager on intense color and marked contrast, this 1854 image of Caracas, unlike its antecedents, seems to be the product of an operation executed from memory in the relaxed atmosphere of a workshop. Certain visual interferences foreign to the actual landscape of the city have slipped through, imbuing the canvas with sudden and unexpected African resonances, with its dark fgures, its palm trees and its white tower, which looks more like a minaret than the modest tower of Caracas’s cathedral. If this painting were not in the series, the entire sequence would fow harmoniously toward that panoramic view of the city which Pissarro himself completed without abandoning the simple instruments of pencil, ink, and paper.

Working prior to Pissarro, the British-born Wood’s lithograph, seen here, provides a topographical view of the city, stretching out before the mountains. The two works by Admiral Sir Michael Seymour, slightly earlier than those by Pissarro, are perhaps more festive, cheerful, and more clearly delineated than Pissarro’s, but they enter into a perfect

dialogue with them in terms of the lightness of their strokes and the pigmentation beftting watercolor.

Continuing to develop this comparison from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century, it ends in that panoramic view of Caracas, signed in 1890, which has been painted by a Venezuelan, no longer a visiting foreigner or a traveling painter, but rather a resident painter, a neighbor from within this city, whose portrayal is nonetheless infuenced by the tradition of all of those views that precede it. This Landscape of Caracas by Tovar y Tovar when compared with Pissarro’s oil painting allows us to establish some kind of coordinates for this ensemble of works, acting as the knots that tie together a fabric made of the lightest mesh, as vulnerable as the paper on which they have been displayed.

These fourteen pieces, then, articulate a small and luminous story of the historical trajectory of Caracas during an era in which it was still notable for its Arcadian rural civility, so seductive to those European painters who had abandoned the cult of Europe in search of virginal landscapes, eager for exoticism and freedom.

rafael castillo zapata

W. Wood (active c. 1840), United Kingdom, engraver, after Joseph Thomas, United Kingdom, View of the City of Caracas from the Calvary, 1839, lithograph on paper, 37.8 × 61.3 cm (14 Y × 24 V inches)

Admiral Sir Michael Seymour

The watercolors painted by Admiral Sir Michael Seymour on board the HMS Vindictive during the winter of 1848 are not merely the products of a standardized military assignment but testimonies of his experience in the face of America’s natural wonders. Seymour painted both landscapes of the Venezuelan port of La Guaira while he served as captain of the HMS Vindictive, the fagship of the British feet in North America and the Caribbean during her 1845–48 tour of the West Indies and North American stations, and he would later present them along with several others as gifts to Rear Admiral Sir Francis William Austen, elder brother of the novelist Jane Austen and the feet commander with whom he sailed on the Vindictive. 1

Approaching La Guaira portrays a faraway coastline whose only distinguishing feature is the Cordillera de la Costa, which sits on the horizon as if rising out of the sea. Seymour’s brushstrokes and choice of a blue palette for rendering both sea and mountains convey an image of difusion and ample distance. On the other hand, La Guaira has a closer vantage point. Seymour outlines the ridges as well as the port’s buildings using a broader range of colors and attending to it with greater detail. La Guaira was a popular subject during the nineteenth century and was also depicted by Ferdinand Bellermann and Anton Goering, among others. While it is true that unlike these artists Seymour was not a professional painter, his watercolors seek to capture his impressions of the landscape, as evidenced by their departure from his formal training in military drawing.

John Christian Schetky, ofcial seascape artist to King George IV and professor at the Portsmouth Naval Academy, instructed Seymour in the rudiments of naval draftsmanship when he attended the school from 1816 to 1818.2 The simplifed style of graphite pencil and watercolor drawing Schetky developed for the students at Portsmouth is evident not only in Seymour’s watercolors of 1848 but also in many of the drawings and works made by the British naval ofcers who attended the academy.3 In spite of Seymour’s adherence to the simplifed style of graphite pencil and watercolor drawing Schetky taught at Portsmouth, these works are not fettered by the technical constraints of coastline surveying. The difuse and distant landscape in Approaching La Guaira is actually contradictory to the principles described in Dominic Serre’s Liber Nauticus, the drawing textbook Schetky employed in his lessons.4 According to Serres, the coastal drawing of a calm sea such as the one portrayed has to be “refected as in a mirror; and even the clouds in the sky, if well composed, assist in relieving the objects so refected,

La Guaira, Venezuela, 1848

Approaching La Guaira, Venezuela, 1848

while they make a considerable addition to its transparency.”5 These watercolors provide little of the refective and transparent quality with which a naval ofcer was meant to convey a calm sea.

It is also important to bear in mind that on board the Vindictive, surveying duties were the responsibility of the three lieutenants.6 As captain, Seymour was not ofcially obliged in any way to produce these watercolors. Given that the drawings did not serve any maritime purpose and that Seymour presented them as a gift to Admiral Austen once they returned to England in 1848, one may assume that they were intended to preserve the visual impressions of the journey. Before the advancement of photography, it was fairly common for ofcers to record their sojourns around the world in the form of drawings and small watercolors.7 Several watercolors of North American landmarks from Seymour’s album are now in the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. While on his journey along the continent, Seymour visited the Niagara Falls, an experience he described in a letter sent to one of his daughters. On the wish to depict the landscape, he comments, “I of course tried to make a few sketches but it is impossible to give on paper the grandeur and intensity they possess.”8 Throughout his sojourn, Seymour exercised his formal training in an attempt to capture the intense and grandiose landscapes he encountered all across the American continent. As such, these works are simultaneously informed by rigid conventions such as the use of pencil and watercolors, and intended for personal recollection.

javier rivero ramos

1 Bermuda Archives, Cruise of the HMS Vindictive on the North America and West Indies Stations 1845–48 (Bermuda: Bermuda Archives, 2000), n.p. Other works by Seymour are housed in the Bermuda Archives, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the Library of Congress.

2 E. H. H. Archibald, The Dictionary of Sea Painters of Europe and America, 3rd ed. (London: Antique Collector’s Club, 2000), 208. Bermuda Archives, n.p.

3 For accounts of the development of marine art during the nineteenth century, see Geof Quilley, Empire to Nation: Art, History and the Visualization of Maritime Britain, 1768–1829 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

4 Bermuda Archives, n.p.

5 John Thomas Serres, Liber Nauticus and Instructor in the Art of Maritime Drawing (London, 1805), n.p.

6 Bermuda National Gallery and the Bermuda Government Archives, Through British Eyes: Images of Bermuda, 1815–1860 (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1996), 18.

7 Geof Quilley, Empire to Nation, 28.

8 Bermuda Archives, n.p.

Admiral Sir Michael Seymour (1802–1887), United Kingdom

La Guaira, Venezuela, 1848

Graphite and watercolor on paper, 17 × 25.4 cm (6 AA⁄af × 10 inches)

Admiral Sir Michael Seymour (1802–1887), United Kingdom

Approaching La Guaira, Venezuela, 1848

Graphite and watercolor on paper, 17.8 × 25.4 cm (7 × 10 inches)

Admiral Sir Michael Seymour

The watercolors of Caracas painted by Admiral Michael Seymour ofer an uncommon glimpse into the international political complexities of mid-nineteenth-century Latin America. While not a professional artist, Seymour was, however, part of a family whose ties to the maritime expansion of Great Britain make his works a testimony of the era. He was an ofcer whose service strengthened Britain’s commercial power overseas and refected the shifting global priorities of the Royal Navy. The works Seymour produced grew from the circumstances of the relationship between Great Britain and Venezuela.

Rear Admiral Sir Francis William Austen, Chief of the North America and West Indies station and Seymour’s commanding ofcer, decided during the Vindictive’s tour of the Bermuda Islands and its patrol of the Caribbean in 1848 to make port at La Guaira in order to travel to Caracas and exchange “a reassurance of the friendship between Great Britain and the legitimate government of Venezuela,” with the newly elected President José Tadeo Monagas.1 A couple of weeks prior to the arrival of Austen and Seymour on Venezuelan shores, political tensions in the country had erupted in a skirmish outside of Congress; it was a scufe that would prove decisive for Venezuela in the coming decade.2 Austen’s decision to travel to Caracas as a military and diplomatic representative of Queen Victoria’s government during a time of internal strife endowed the Vindictive’s mission with a particular political notoriety and demonstrated the shift in policies of the world’s most powerful navy during the nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy began the long process of transforming its mostly ofensive force into a defensive instrument that would allow the British Empire to further secure and expand its hold on global trade.3 In years prior to the Vindictive’s tour, the Royal Navy provided support for British citizens and merchants in Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly during the Mexican-American War that broke out in 1846 and the Haitian revolts of the same year.4 Reftting the North American and West Indies stations and upgrading the presence of the Royal Navy in the region became a priority after its poor performance during the War of 1812 against the seemingly weaker United States Navy.5 While Austen’s decision to make port at La Guaira refects Great Britain’s determination to exert commercial control of maritime routes through the peaceful enforcement of the Royal Navy, Seymour’s service history also illustrates the role that maritime ofcers played in the shifting economic scenarios of the time. Michael Seymour joined the Royal Navy as a lieutenant at the age of ffteen and retired forty-fve years later with the rank of full admiral.6

City of Caracas from the Chacou Road, 1848

Market Place, City of Caracas, Venezuela, 1848

Later in life, Seymour played a key role in the development of colonial policy during the Second Opium War as chief of the East India Station.7 Seymour’s participation in this episode added to his family’s many contributions to the British Royal Navy in the era of maritime expansion. His father obtained baronetage for the Seymour family after his involvement in a battle against the French Navy in 1808.8 This family’s profound engagement with the navy is also made evident by the naval and military motifs of their coat of arms, such as sea crowns, sailors, marines, anchors, and cannons.9 This concern with the interests of Britain’s hegemony is discernible in Seymour’s choice of subject.

Seymour’s watercolors of Caracas tend to privilege buildings and certain topographical features that are landmarks, such as the cathedral in front of the market or the wide valley between the hills.10 This predilection is most evident in the marketplace, where people are rendered without any facial features whatsoever. Even when these watercolors were not intended for military purposes, Seymour’s interests lay not in the folkloric but in practical features such as topography and structures.

1 Bermuda Archives, Cruise of the HMS Vindictive on the North America and West Indies Stations 1845–48 (Bermuda: Bermuda Archives, 2000), n.p.

2 Robert L. Gilmore, Caudillism and Militarism in Venezuela, 1810–1910 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1964), 79.

3 Michael Lewis, The Navy in Transition: 1814–1864, A Social History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), 12.

4 Bermuda Archives, n.p.

5 Jeremy Black, “A British View of the War of 1812,” Naval History Magazine, no. 4 (August 2008): 27.

6 Michael Seymour, Royal Navy service sheet, ADM/ 196/6, the National Archives, Surrey.

7 Sir William Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy, A History from the Earliest Times to the Death of Queen Victoria, vol. 7 (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1903), 93.

8 Richard Seymour, Memoir of Rear-Admiral Sir Michael Seymour, Bart., KCB (London: Spottiswoode, 1878), 52.

9 Charles Mosley, ed., Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage, 106th ed. (London: Burke’s Peerage/Genealogical Books, 1990), 733.

10 Luis Pérez- Oramas, “Market Place, Caracas,” (unpublished).

javier rivero ramos

Admiral Sir Michael Seymour (1802–1887), United Kingdom

City of Caracas from the Chacou Road, 1848

Graphite and watercolor on paper, 17.8 × 25.7 cm (7 × 10 V inches)

Admiral Sir Michael Seymour (1802–1887), United Kingdom

Market Place, City of Caracas, Venezuela, 1848

Graphite and watercolor on paper, 17.8 × 25.7 cm (7 × 10 V inches)

Martín Tovar y Tovar

Martín Tovar y Tovar, the most renowned painter of nineteenthcentury Venezuela, painted landscapes, although they were not as acclaimed as his other work during his lifetime. His public image as a portraitist and history painter impeded the evaluation of his landscapes due to their modest format and lack of historical subjects. It was Enrique Planchart, the leading critic of the Círculo de Bellas Artes generation (1912–17), who made creole landscape a major consideration in the art market and who emphasized Tovar’s contributions to this genre.

In 1938, when the Museo de Bellas Artes inaugurated its new building in Caracas designed by architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, the public noted the absence of paintings by Tovar y Tovar. Immediately, private collectors ofered up their works for a separate exhibition at the Ateneo de Caracas, with ffty art works by the celebrated artist. The critics were quick to recognize that “Perhaps even more than a creator of dramatic gestures, Tovar is truly a painter who loves the landscape . . . the execution of the terrain is exacting, luminous, precise. The trees, the crevices, the weeds are worked over with true delectation, the distances studied and corrected in an exceedingly attractive manner. He put equal care into the study of all of its qualities, which are defned with precision.”1

Two motifs predominate in Tovar’s landscape production: the surroundings of his birthplace of Caracas, and the area around the town of Macuto, in the coastal region of La Guaira, where he vacationed. Whether they focus on Caracas or Macuto, the major diference between these landscapes and his other works—and what makes them modern—is the total abandonment of fnish or academic perfection in favor of the rough sketch. Critic Juan Calzadilla says as much: “Tovar adopts the technique of sketching, strokes take the place of academic perfection and in this way the atmosphere flls the painting and imbues it with that invisible character called light ”2

Among the landscapes of Caracas, Tovar painted both distant views of the city and views of Mount Ávila. In the former case, while the painter’s point of view varies, it is almost always located north of the city in the foothills of Ávila, so that the view is from above and at a distance, as if on horseback. This is a traditional focus, more concerned with detailing the features of the surroundings and the city from a placid conceptualization of landscape, without dramatic treatment of light or the Romantic quest for the sublime.

In the case of Landscape of Caracas: View from Anauco, previously identifed with the erroneous title Petare Landscape, the painter situ-

Landscape of Caracas: View from Anauco, c. 1890

ated himself at an elevated location that at the time was countryside, at the foot of Mount Ávila, the location of the Quinta de Anauco and the former residence of the Marqués del Toro. A foreground plane traverses the painting horizontally, full of leafy greens that contrast with the ochre of the eroded ravine, immediately showcasing the primary focus: the city expanding toward the southeast, with its agglomeration of red rooftops, whitewashed walls, and small ivory church towers, behind which we fnd the hills, and above them, the clouds and sky.

The lack of concern with covering the upper and lower surface of the canvas gives the painting an unfnished character, which is its virtue and the reason there is no second version undertaken a posteriori in the tranquility of the studio, as a painter like Ferdinand Bellermann would have done. This is the defnitive work, just as the Impressionists viewed it, though in Tovar’s case there was no further adventurousness in his palette, which remained academic in its traditional combinations of cold tones (greens, blues, violets) and warm tones (ochres, siennas, yellows), which are muted in order to represent nature without the violent transformations that the tropical sun could bring about. The painter sought to capture a soft, even light that opens up the whole panorama to discovery without stridency, a model he would also apply in his series on Macuto.

roldán esteva- grillet

1 Enrique Planchart, Don Martín Tovar y Tovar (Caracas: Ministerio Educación Nacional, 1938). Republished in La pintura en Venezuela (Caracas: Editorial Equinoccio / Universidad Simón Bolívar, 1979), 14.

2 Juan Calzadilla and Perán Erminy, El paisaje como tema en la pintura venezolana (Caracas: Edición Especial Compañia Shell de Venezuela, 1975), 36.

Martín Tovar y Tovar (1827–1902), Venezuela

Landscape of Caracas: View from Anauco, c. 1890 Oil on canvas, 38 × 78 cm (14 AE⁄af × 30 AA⁄af inches)

Camille Pissarro

This group of works by Camille Pissarro represents his Caribbean beginnings. Born in Charlotte Amalie on Saint Thomas (then the Danish West Indies), he resided there until age twenty-two. Then, a meeting with the Danish artist Fritz Georg Melbye, on a visit to the island, changed his life. Seeing some of Pissarro’s early drawings of his native town, Melbye recognized his talent immediately and invited him to travel together to Venezuela.1 Working there from 1852 to 1854, he made approximately two hundred small-scale sketches, drawings, and paintings that were probably intended for sale to private collectors. In these works Pissarro began to experiment with various media that he would continue using throughout his career, and he incorporated color for the frst time through watercolor. He represented subject matter central to his practice, particularly costumbrista scenes and the light and ambience of the Venezuelan landscape.2 Pissarro’s Venezuelan works anticipate his later Impressionist response to landscape, and were infuenced by his travel companion, Melbye.3

They embarked on their journey in October of 1852, and although they arrived in La Guaira, Venezuela much like other traveler artists of their time, Pissarro’s journey was unlike theirs in signifcant ways.5 Most traveler artists came from Europe to Latin America steeped in academic tradition, and many were infuenced or commissioned by royalty, government, or their artist predecessors.6 Pissarro, however, traveled from Charlotte Amalie in Saint Thomas to Venezuela to pursue a career as an artist before he settled in France in 1855.7 Although Pissarro was trained in fgure drawing as a boy at M. Savaray’s school in France, he was largely self-taught. Melbye instructed Pissarro on the importance of observation, gesture, and rapidity even as Pissarro developed his own interpretation and expression of the light of coastal Venezuela.8

Pissarro and Melbye arrived in Venezuela during a time of political turmoil and extreme poverty.9 As always, Pissarro took an avid interest in the daily life of local people. His itinerary can be traced through his works. Pissarro completed both La Guaira and New Road, La Guaira in 1852, most likely during the months that he and Melbye spent in La Guaira before traveling to Maiquetía.10 La Guaira, in pencil and ink on paper, is more typical of Pissarro’s choice of subject matter, depicting a costumbrista scene of locals carrying jugs on their heads beneath a lush, tropical tree. The proximity of the fgures to the palm tree as well as Pissarro’s even-handed lighting of the fgures and the fora surrounding them gives them a natural appearance within the landscape, with all elements given equal importance.

La Guaira, 1852

New Road, La Guaira, 1852

Landscape, n.d.

Panoramic View of Caracas, n.d.

Maiquetía River, 1852

The Hacienda, 1852

Pariata, 1853

A Plaza in Caracas, 1854–58

New Road, La Guaira, Panoramic View of Caracas, and Landscape are typical of the airy sketches Pissarro made during his time in Venezuela. At frst glance, these drawings appear light and unfnished. They show Pissarro’s creative process yet appear as complete, bright landscape scenes.11 Pissarro captures the impression of the overall landscape rather than showing topographical or scientifc interest in documenting details of Caracas and its surrounding terrain. Landscape represents an unknown location, while Panoramic View of Caracas shows a view of the city from the south, and New Road, La Guaira represents the road that connected the port of La Guaira to Caracas. In these drawings, Pissarro captured the atmosphere and efect of the Venezuelan light through his use of lighter pencil marks that loosely describe form. The mountains in all three sketches are bathed in light, and the landscape is lightly penciled all over with rapid, confdent lines, evoking the anti-academic depiction of sensation that became characteristic of Pissarro’s style.

In Maiquetía, Pissarro completed the drawing Maiquetía River in December of 1852. 12 While this drawing is darker and denser than the previous pencil drawings around La Guaira, it still conveys the sensation of the river rather than attempting an exact replication of landscape details. The Hacienda, an undated charcoal drawing on paper of an unknown location, shows a more complete work that relates to the Impressionist style that Pissarro continued to develop, evoking the impression of human fgures and animals within the Venezuelan landscape. Again, Pissarro depicted locals in their daily, humble routines, without classical academic structure.

Pissarro and Melbye returned to La Guaira at the end of December 1853, where Pissarro completed Pariata. It is the only watercolor in this group, and it is the frst time Pissarro is seen using the palette he learned from Melbye.13 This same palette returns in much of Pissarro’s Impressionist work later in his career. Here, the light application of greys, greens, blues, and earth tones capture the efect of the bright tropical light in La Guaira. Pariata is another example of Pissarro’s interest in the costumbrista scene, with a modest dwelling drawn amid quickly executed tropical fora, and a delicate, unfnished fgure rendered on the right. Pissarro applied the same treatment of color, light, and brushwork to each landscape element, while the fgure is almost ghost-like. Pariata is yet another representation of Pissarro’s interest in conveying the sensation of form and the efect of light in an unpretentious scene, and his lack of concern with exact representation.

The last and most complete of the Venezuelan landscapes by Camille Pissarro in this collection is the oil painting, A Plaza in Caracas, dated between 1854 and 1858, produced during the frst four years he spent in France. Uniquely, among the other Venezuelan landscapes seen here, A Plaza in Caracas was completed after Pissarro had left Venezuela. He likely utilized a number of sketches he made in 1854 of the marketplace in Caracas and its surroundings in the painting’s composition.

While in some respects a departure from Pissarro’s other Venezuelan images, A Plaza in Caracas still privileges sensation over form with an Impressionist palette that showcases the bright tropical light of the Venezuelan coast. The Altagracia church can be seen in the background, and the marketplace of Caracas is in the foreground, while the fgures in this painting assume the natural gestures and postures of daily routine. The painting marks Pissarro’s mature mastery of color and paint, building upon lessons learned from Melbye to achieve his distinctive style.

Pissarro’s nationality combined with his lack of academic training or government sponsorship distinguished him from other nineteenthcentury traveler artists whose obligations focused on topography, scientifc exactitude, and the perfect rendering or duplication of the landscape. Free of any political, scientifc, or other specifc agenda, Pissarro was able to pursue his artistic interests without restraint, and the results are apparent in the originality of Pissarro’s sketches, drawings, and paintings.

sarah connors

1 Alfredo Boulton, Camille Pissarro en Venezuela (Caracas, Venezuela: Venezuelan Art Publishing Press, 1966), 6.

2 John House, Review of: Pissarro. Catalogue critique des peintures [Critical Catalogue of Paintings] by Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, The Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1262 (May 2008): 331.

3 John Canaday, “Art: The Young Pissarro’s Venezuelan Adventure: Impressionist Work of 1852–54 on View,” New York Times, February 2, 1968.

4 Boulton, 7.

5 Ibid., 8.

6 Ibid., 10.

7 Ibid., 14.

8 Ibid., 9.

9 Ibid., 9.

10 Louisa Frost Turley, Review, Christian Science Monitor, February 20, 1968.

11 Boulton, 9.

12 Ibid., 16.

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands

La Guaira, 1852

Graphite and ink on paper, 26.5 × 35 cm (10 × 13 O inches)

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands

New Road, La Guaira, 1852

Graphite on paper, 26 × 36 cm (10 N × 14 C⁄af inches)

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands

Landscape, n.d.

Graphite on paper, 27 × 38.1 cm (10 X × 15 inches)

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands

Panoramic View of Caracas, n.d.

Graphite and ink on paper, 24.1 × 67.3 cm (9 K × 26 K inches)

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands

Maiquetía River, 1852

Graphite on paper, 34.3 × 27.9 cm (13 K × 11 inches)

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands

The Hacienda, n.d.

Charcoal on paper, 28.6 × 24.5 cm (11 N × 9 X inches)

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands

Pariata, 1853

Watercolor and graphite on paper, 22 × 27 cm (8 AA⁄af × 10 X inches)

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands

A Plaza in Caracas, 1854–58

Oil on canvas, 26.7 × 46 cm (10 K × 18 V inches)

CARIBBEAN AND CENTRAL AMERICA

In the nineteenth century, a Caribbean landscape painting was often the sole vista onto a foreign terrain that would have been otherwise out of reach for the non-traveler. Not only did it promise the viewer the ability to be transported to another region, it also intimated the containment of a moment of light and atmosphere that the painter had designated ft for the canvas in hues of cerulean, viridian, harsh white, and at times rose and yellow. Many of the painters of the Caribbean landscape were traveler artists, who were trained in the academic tradition of the seventeenth-century Claudian landscape. This tradition of portraying the land was derived from the infuential work of Claude Lorrain, whose paintings were compositionally framed by trees on either side of the canvas, and contained conventional tropes such as a body of water, a river, and a road or path which led the viewer from the foreground, to the middle ground, and then beyond to the horizon line.

This paradigm of the academic tradition enabled traveler artists and locally trained artists to delineate the Caribbean—a motley group of geographical landscapes and cultural cross-fertilizations. Caribbean landscapes depict a region defned by the islands and landmasses abutting the Caribbean Sea. Over 700 isles make up three distinct archipelagoes—the Greater Antilles, the Lesser Antilles, and the Bahamas—that sit between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.1 Although geographically restricted to the North American continent, cultural afnities in mainland countries that face the Caribbean Sea such as Belize, Guyana, Surinam, and at times Venezuela, among others, make these places a part of the historical Caribbean. More recently, scholars have also begun to include diasporic communities from Miami to New Orleans in a broader delineation of the Caribbean, with these large cities defning their own borderless Caribbean.2

By the nineteenth century, many landscape painters chose to include indexical markers of the Caribbean in their works. Artists incorporated palm trees, indigenous orchids, and colorful wildlife.3 Beyond these transparent depictions of terrain or the legibility of recognizable fora and fauna, Caribbean landscape paintings often obscured the intentions of the maker, the imperialistic designs of the patron, and the punitive realities of labor for the miniscule fgures in the paintings.

Nineteenth-century artists painted a region that had been settled much earlier by explorers, and eventually turned over to large-scale plantations. The zenith of Caribbean landscape painting is one that coincides with the period in history when over two-thirds of the pop-

ulation of the Caribbean was enslaved. Tied to the sugar trade, the enslaved populations were the majority only in countries where sugar was the main crop.4 Yet it is impossible to perceive these seascapes, looming mountains, and lush pastoral farms without being privy to the historical obfuscations of these works. Seemingly quaint roads and bridges often led to billowing smokestacks indicating sugar works. Sauntering farmhands belied the mass enslavement in the region. A church steeple peeping out from the forest normalized these environs for European audiences, who often were told of the region’s harsh, miasmic, and disease-flled conditions.5

In addition, scholars in this feld locate the scarcity of black bodies in Caribbean landscapes as directly correlated with the need to convey ideas of “detoxifcation” and “safety” to European audiences. With the European population constituting the minority on most of the islands, the menace of a potential slave revolt characterized journalistic descriptions of the region, but was wholly absent from the majority of Caribbean landscape paintings. The pictorial industry of Caribbean landscape painting often did not serve solely one patron; these works were often turned into prints and had vast audiences. It is

Detail of Camille Pissarro’s Cove with Sailboat; see page 95.

telling that the production of Caribbean landscapes wanes as the region becomes unstable for Europeans following the 1804 revolution in Saint Domingue (Haiti) and Jamaica’s subsequent slave revolt in 1834. In December of 1823, the United States, anticipating the shift of power in the Caribbean and Latin America, passed the Monroe Doctrine. The United States would eventually lead military occupations of Puerto Rico (1898–today), Haiti (1915–34) and Cuba (1898–1902, 1917–22). These strategic interventions were meant to muscle out European involvement in the region.

It is important to remember that despite the history of political and economic struggle between people of European and African descent, the Caribbean was originally named for one group of indigenous inhabitants, the Caribs, who were culturally analogous with the Mesoamerican communities in Florida, the Yucatan, and Central America.6

Conquest by English, Danish, French, Dutch, and Spanish powers and their importation of slaves brought West African traditions to the region, which led to a cataclysmic integration of variegated cultures into modern societies in the Atlantic.7 The near eradication of indigenous populations in some islands obscures the fact that their customs were integrated with those of Africa and Europe. Cultural historians such as Edouard Glissant have called the heterogeneous cultural mixture of the Caribbean a poetics of creolization.8 Glissant defned creolization as a mix of cultural forms to make a new language: one that is wholly modern. The aesthetics of the Caribbean can also be seen as creolized based on European, African, and indigenous image-making practices. The Caribbean landscape, then, takes on many forms dependent on the maker, the patron, and the audience. The variety of makers in this collection, whether travelers or locally trained artists, ensures a rich, multivalent view of the region.

andrianna

1 B. W. Higman, A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5. The Bahamas was traditionally not included in geographic defnitions, but Higman includes it here.

2 An insightful example is Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

3 Katherine Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 13.

4 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985). In Cuba, Puerto Rico, and parts of the Bahamas, free Europeans made up approximately half of the total population.

5 Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance, 147. Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refnement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1–12 and Kay Dian Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane’s Voyage . . . to Jamaica,” in An Economy of Colour, ed. by Geof Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (Oxford: Alden Press), 85.

6 Other indigenous groups include the Arawaks, the Taino, and the Warao. Stephan Palmé and Francisco A. Scanaro, The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1–27.

7 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

8 Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1981), 146.

campbell

Fritz Georg Melbye

Fritz Melbye’s A Blue Hole, Jamaica is a composite work painted from observation and cast in the idealized Claudian tradition.1 An unsigned sketch from Melbye’s Jamaica sojourn was most likely a study for A Blue Hole, Jamaica and carries the inscription on the stretcher “The Blue Hole/Jamaica.” The connection might seem overwrought, but Blue Hole is a common name on the tropical island; however, Melbye sketched a large plantation, no doubt the Blue Hole Estate, near Montego Bay in the parish of Saint James.2 Visibly dry and parched land in the sketch shows how extensive and devastating a regional drought had been, especially to a planter economy still recovering from the loss thirty years earlier of slave labor. In constrast with Melbye’s depictions of other parts of the island, the sketch illustrates the dramatic diferences between areas of the island experiencing a drought and other verdant, lush regions.

Melbye had set out for Jamaica with Frederic Church, and from Church’s letters we know that there was a distinctive drought line that ran through the island.3 Melbye composed A Blue Hole, Jamaica without reference to the drought. Rather than being a strict document of his observations, the painting borrows from the conventions set down by Claude Lorrain. The topography is punctuated by a winding river that acts as a repoussoir, leading the viewer’s eye from foreground to background. In comparison with The Blue Hole sketch, where aridity abounds, the painting’s deep greens and blues enliven what was a parched monotone region. In the sketch, we see iconographically less “exotic” logwood or pimento groves, which are transformed into a canopy of palm trees.4 Located inland on the less lush side of the island, the Blue Hole Estate would not have been dotted by so many palms.

Telltale signs of long settlement—several buildings, and multiple paths—have been omitted, and replaced by a winding path on the right side of the canvas. Civilization still exists but it is obscured. A Blue Hole, Jamaica fails to depict the horror of post-slavery labor conditions in the Caribbean, of which there are ample textual accounts.5 The black fgures head toward a billowing smokestack indicating the sugar works close by.6 But more importantly, the painting obsfucates the political unrest in Jamaica during Melbye’s visit.7 The Morant Bay protests in October of 1865 led to Governor Eyre ordering the execution of over four hundred citizens and the arrest of another fve hundred.8 Melbye had been visiting the governor during this period, yet, A Blue Hole, Jamaica, like many landscape paintings of the period, presents a bucolic, peaceful terrain unfettered and unchanged by the socio-political climate of the region.9

Melbye frst visited the Caribbean in 1849 under direct commission from King Christian VIII of Denmark. He went to Saint Thomas to create topographic drawings of the island. Melbye spent over a decade in the Caribbean and South America before moving to New York in 1860. In the 1862 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Annual Exhibition, he exhibited View of Saint Thomas, West Indies, which hung in the southeast gallery in close proximity to Frederic Church’s Landscape in South America. The two works must have been striking for their exotic touch when other paintings on view delineated the green mountains of Vermont, an old mill building in Pennsylvania, or the familiar subject of the Roman Campagna.10 Church and Melbye met sometime between the autumn of 1860 and 1865, when they journeyed to Jamaica together.11 The trip to Jamaica had been inspiring. Most signifcantly, Melbye painted several sketches and a large Jamaica painting, A Blue Hole, Jamaica with centrally located mountains, verdant foliage, and prominent palm trees. Melbye cast the tropical landscape in the pastoral tradition.

After returning to the United States, Melbye left many of his Jamaica drawings and paintings with Church. Among those items were a plethora of works by his student, the young Camille Pissarro. It was supposed to be a temporary storage arrangement before a long trip to Asia. Melbye died in Shanghai before ever returning to retrieve his work. A Blue Hole, Jamaica is a rare example of a Caribbean painting made after the emancipation of the enslaved population, but before the plantation system had begun to unravel.

A Blue Hole, Jamaica, 1866

andrianna campbell

1 This was a common practice for landscape painters, as in Church’s Heart of the Andes

2 The estate is listed in an account of the island created for the British Parliament by the command of Queen Victoria. See Papers Relative to the West Indies: Jamaica and Barbados 1841–1842 (London: William Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street, 1842), 124.

3 Frederic Church to Mr. Cole, July 28, 1865, Transcript in Olana Research Collection.

4 For a discussion of the palm tree as a ubiquitous marker of tropiclality, see Katherine Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1989), 13–14.

5 Henry Whiteley, Three Months in Jamaica in 1832: A Residence of Seven Weeks on a Sugar Plantation (London: J. Hatchard & Son, 1833), 4.

6 Melbye produced several paintings of sugar works in the Danish West Indies. Sugar Mill in Saint Thomas in the National Museum of Denmark is one such example.

7 See Valerie Balint, “The Hidden Olana: Another Hunter among Picturesque Mountains: Fritz Melbye in Jamaica,” The Olana Crayon, for a detailed account of Melbye’s biography and other sketches.

8 He was later prosecuted for his crimes against Jamaicans in a long, well-publicized trial.

9 Frederic Church to Mr. Austin, August 14, 1865, Olana Research Collection. Also see Lizabeth Paravisini- Gebert, “‘American’ Landscapes and Erasures: Frederic Church’s Vale of St. Thomas and the Recovery of History in Landscape Painting,” in Perspectives on the “Other America”: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture, ed. Michael Niblett and Kerstin Olof (New York: Rodopi, 2009), 45–67; and Jennifer Raab, “Details of Absence: Frederic Church and the Landscape of Post-Emancipation Jamaica,” Art History 34, no. 4 (September 2011): 714–731.

10 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition, vol. 35–50 (Philadelphia: Collins, 1860–1863).

11 It seemed a natural outgrowth of their combined interests in landscape painting and the Caribbean. Their continued friendship is illustrated by Melbye’s 1864 gift to Church of the painting Entrance to the City of Saint Domingo, Columbus “Tower.” See Katherine Manthorne, “Olana, Salon for Jamaican Journeyers,” in Fern Hunting Among these Picturesque Mountains: Frederic Edwin Church in Jamaica (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 45–67.

Fritz Georg Melbye (1826–1869), Denmark

A Blue Hole, Jamaica, 1866

Oil on canvas, 74.9 × 110.5 cm (29 K × 43 K inches)

Henry Cleenewerck

Henry Cleenewerck most likely painted his landscape of a sugar plantation in the Matanzas region for one of the numerous wealthy Cuban families that sought out his work during the three years he spent in Cuba between 1865 and 1868. Cleenewerck, after briefy training at academies in Europe, moved to the United States to make and sell his work. Cleenewerck’s career was infuenced by his nomadic lifestyle; after his European training, he spent time living and working in California and Georgia, then traveled to Cuba. This painting reveals a great deal about the nature of his clients’ relationship to the Cuban landscape at a decisive point in that country’s history, just one year before the Cuban elite would initiate a series of three wars against Spain that would eventually lead to Cuba’s independence in 1898.1

While he was studying in Belgium and briefy exhibiting in Germany, Cleenewerck learned the pictorial conventions of the picturesque, which he used with great fuency in this Cuban landscape. Rough and smooth, and dark and light aspects of the landscape are skillfully woven together to present a scene that holds our interest by describing objects in great detail while also providing a striking overall impression of the mountainous landscape of Matanzas. In the foreground, on the edges of the painting, we are ofered plant life to examine in detail— banana, cacti, and grasses—and in the center, we see a herd of cattle walking through a calm pool of water. Alternating areas of shadow and light lead our eye to the middle ground and then into the distance. The dark, textured forest in the middle ground opens up onto the lighter and more smoothly rendered valley and mountains in the distance, and just to the right of the canvas’s center, sugar cane felds, including tiny renderings of their mill, can be spied. The face of the only fgure in the painting, an Afro-Cuban man on horseback who is tending to the cattle, is, like the forest behind him, obscured by shadow, whereas the cattle and plants in the foreground and the valley and mountains in the background are bathed in light. The pinkish cast of the sky and background may have been inspired by the well-known West Coast painter Norton Bush, whom Cleenewerck, drawn west by the gold rush, might have encountered while living in California during the mid-1850s.

Cleenewerck’s landscape is also, however, marked by the social and political concerns of Cuba in 1866: the importance of the production of sugar, the persistence of slavery, and the impending wars of independence against Spain. The sugar felds and mill in the distance mark the scene as an industrial landscape, especially considering that Cleenewerck has rendered the steam engine of the modern sugar mill

An Extensive Cuban Landscape, Cattle Watering at a Pool in the Foreground, 1866

legible by marking the cluster of buildings with a bright, white vertical stroke of paint. The modernity of this tiny symbol contrasts considerably with the fgure of the Afro-Cuban cattle driver in the foreground, whose outmoded role is expressed by his rural dress. Slavery, which would not be abolished until a year after this painting was made, is juxtaposed with modernity. The sugar cane felds and its mill are also, notably, framed by the mountains of Matanzas in the background and the tropical forest in the middle ground, an arrangement that situates it explicitly within the natural landscape of Cuba. The naturalist’s interest in the diversity of Cuba’s fora—the palms, fowering cacti, and deciduous trees that populate the forests in the Matanzas region—is rendered by Cleenewerck with a degree of accuracy that suggests he was appealing to his clients’ interest in the land. Their patriotic love of land that provided both wealth and the impetus for rebuking Spanish rule is thus expressed in the guise of a picturesque formula that Cleenewerck had learned in Europe and perfected in the United States. When Cleenewerck left Cuba in 1868, two years after he made this painting, he was forced to do so by the onset of the frst war that Cuban landowners would wage against Spain to gain independence.

1 Peggy and Harold Samuels, The Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976); and David Karel, Dictionnaire des artistes de langue française en Amérique du Nord: Peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs, graveurs, photographes et orfèvres (Quebec City: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1992), 181.

harper montgomery

Henry Cleenewerck (1818–1901), Belgium

An Extensive Cuban Landscape, Cattle Watering at a Pool in the Foreground, 1866 Oil on canvas, 66 × 92.3 cm (26 × 36 W inches)

Émile Goury

View of Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe by the French painter Émile Goury depicts the island where Christopher Columbus arrived on his second trip to America in 1493. Columbus named it Santa María de Guadalupe after the royal monastery in Spain’s province of Extremadura, in honor of the Catholic monarchs who supported him. Guadeloupe and other smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles were considered islas inútiles by the Spanish, and remained largely unoccupied during the colonial period. Instead, Spain established claims on the larger islands of Cuba and Saint-Domingue and on the mainland of present-day Venezuela. Originally inhabited by the Caribs and the Arawaks, by the nineteenth century Guadeloupe had been a center of French trade for nearly two centuries, as a producer of sugar cane and cocoa.

Goury’s painting of Guadeloupe’s tropical landscape is dominated by a clear morning sky. The scene includes mountains, palm trees, a bay in which distant sailboats foat, and three fgures on a cobbled path. Goury depicts the singular proximity of the mountains to the sea typical of the coastal Caribbean. A large shadow cast by the rising sun enters the left foreground of the painting, covering part of the path and groups of plants that include palms, banana trees, and Coccoloba uvifera (sea grape) trees. On an illuminated section of the path, a black man leans on a fence next to a basket of bananas that he appears to be selling; it had been customary for some landowners to give part of their harvest to their slaves to sell, sharing the revenues. Moving away from us, farther in the distance, are two other men from diferent races and social classes; one on a horse, and another walking next to the rider. Even with only a few clues to their identity, their presence is evidence of the centuries of racial mixing of African, European, Asian, and indigenous people that has made the Caribbean a particularly important site of hybridity

Like other artists of his time, Goury painted exotic landscapes with the likely goal of exhibiting them in European centers. We know that between 1838 and 1844, he participated twice in the Salon de Paris, although it is not known if View of Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe was among the works exhibited.1 He was also, however, responding to his encounter with the politics of Guadeloupe. At the time, Guadeloupe was the largest island in the Lesser Antilles after Trinidad, and possessed a population that was thirteen percent white, three percent free people of color (which included descendants of slave owners and slaves), and eighty-four percent slaves (whose numbers included Africans and those of mixed race). Over time, the slave population had grown expo-

nentially, and its social organization had developed a hierarchy that positioned slaves of mixed European and African descent at the top, working as artisans and domestics.2 Although Goury represented Guadeloupe as an idyllic tropical landscape, he also drew attention to the complex status of race within its slave-based society

1 The frst Paris Salons in which Goury could have participated are 1838 and 1839, coinciding with the date of View of Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe. The second participation of Goury in the Salon de Paris was in 1842 or 1844. Goury’s paintings were in the collection of the museum of Boulogne-sur-Mer, founded in 1825. Before World War I, the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chartres included Goury’s Vue des environs de Rome (1842) and Vue du couvent de Paterno, Sicile, which were apparently destroyed in 1944.

2 After the French Revolution, the French colony of Guadeloupe witnessed a surge of popular politics inspired by news of the French Revolution. New French laws, revolutionary instructions, and commissioners from metropolitan authorities along with newspapers and private mail flled with both factual and fanciful stories arrived on ships from Europe. A painting of Guadeloupe from the early nineteenth century that points to the social and racial revolution of its time can be used as a tool for understanding the legacy of diference, hybridity, and inequality in the Caribbean.

View of Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, 1839

silvia benedetti

Émile Goury (1813–1847), France

View of Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, 1839 Oil on canvas, 51.4 × 81.3 cm (20 N × 32 inches)

Camille Pissarro

Camille Pissarro was born and raised on Saint Thomas in the city of Charlotte Amalie.1 Pissarro attended M. Savaray’s school in France, where his teacher encouraged him to draw everything around his native land.2 Before leaving Saint Thomas for Venezuela in 1852, Pissarro made many sketches of the sailing vessels at Charlotte Amalie’s free ports, and of its daily life and local people.3 Returning to Saint Thomas in 1854 after spending two years of intensive artistic activity in Venezuela, he left to settle permanently in France in 1855.4 A year later, in 1856, he produced Cove with Sailboat, an oil painting that represents the coast of Saint Thomas. As with this painting, during his frst years working as an artist in France, Pissarro continued to paint scenes of his tropical home from memory on small-scale canvases, likely intended for sale in the private art market, using the sketches he had made between 1854 and 1855 in Charlotte Amalie.5 Pissarro often painted or sketched scenes when he no longer lived or worked in a given location, suggesting that he was especially interested in the practice of rendering the impression and sensations of the landscape that remained in his memory 6

Cove with Sailboat features a bay in Saint Thomas highlighted by tropical sunlight with a sailboat foating in the calm, refective waters. A narrow ribbon of beach runs between the water and rich tropical fora including a pair of iconic palm trees, beneath which two fgures stand. The fgure on the right appears to have a darker complexion than the other, which would have been an accurate account of the mixed race population of Charlotte Amalie at the time. The fora covering the hillsides in the background on either side of the cove lack detail that would allow for their specifc identifcation. While Cove with Sailboat possesses a light and airy quality similar to many of his Venezuelan artworks, the sensation of light is less intense. The tropical light that Pissarro captured during his time in Venezuela appears more unforgiving than that of the Antillean sunlight. Despite the more subdued light in Cove with Sailboat, he shows a mastery and understanding of tonality and luminosity. The fgures walking along the beach, as well as the palm trees, are bathed in bright tropical sunlight.

This painting most likely represents a patchwork of memories rather than an actual place in Saint Thomas. Though more idyllic than his Venezuelan works, the painting still encapsulates Pissarro’s interest in sensation over form, with equal treatment of the fgures and landscape and the lack of attention to botanical detail. Though the trees in this painting are clearly tropical palms, he used loose gestural brush

strokes in the leaves. This set Pissarro apart from the other traveler artists of the nineteenth century who took painstaking eforts to document local botany in scientifc detail. Another notable diference is that Pissarro did not need to travel to observe the land depicted in the painting. Instead of traveling from Europe to the New World, he left his native Saint Thomas to settle in Europe, stopping over in Venezuela before moving permanently to France.

The infuence of his teacher, mentor, and friend, the Danish painter Fritz Georg Melbye, who accompanied Pissarro during his years working in Venezuela from 1852 to 1854, can still be seen in this painting. Melbye utilized a unique palette in his paintings in Venezuela, with Veronese green, grey, ochre, cobalt blue, as well as earthy tones, all of which went against the traditional academic palette.7 The use of these anti-academic colors allowed Melbye to depict the luminosity and tonality unique to the tropics, and he taught Pissarro to see how light changed through the use of color.8 Pissarro incorporated this palette into Cove with Sailboat, with light and airy blues and greens combined with earthy tones to reproduce the natural light and its refection of the tropical landscape of Saint Thomas. With this painting, as with others he executed in Europe, he demonstrated the understanding and mastery of color and light that he learned from Melbye in Venezuela.

sarah connors

1 John Canaday, “The Young Pissarro’s Venezuelan Adventure: Impressionist’s Work of 1852–54 on View,” New York Times, February 2, 1968.

2 Alfredo Boulton, Camille Pissarro en Venezuela (Caracas: Venezuelan Art Publishing Press, 1966), 6.

3 Ibid., 6–7.

4 Ibid., 10.

5 Christie’s. New York. 2014. http://www.christies.com/lotfnder/paintings/camillepissarro-crique-avec-voilier-5554033-details.aspx.

6 John House, Review of: Pissarro. Catalogue critique des peintures [Critical Catalogue of Paintings] by Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts The Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1262 (May 2008): 331.

7 Boulton, 16.

8 Ibid., 14.

Cove with Sailboat, 1856

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands Cove with Sailboat, 1856 Oil on canvas, 35 × 53 cm (13 O × 20 Y inches)

Daniel Lerpinière

Francis Skelly

Daniel Lerpinière made a series of six engravings published in London in 1778 titled Views in the Island of Jamaica after works by the English landscape painter George Robertson.1 These scenes—two of which are in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros—seek to document an exotic and foreign locale for viewers back home in England, but also to reimagine colonial Jamaica’s sugar plantations and rivers as sites for aesthetic contemplation. By portraying Jamaica and its enslaved inhabitants according to the principles of the picturesque, Robertson’s engravings attempted to transform unknown lands and strange peoples into familiar, palatable entities.

In this depiction of the River Cobre, which runs in the eastern Parish of Saint Catherine, the artist has made several nods to the picturesque. A winding road dotted with small fgures leads the viewer’s eye through the composition. We note rushing water at left, craggy boulders and a dead tree at right. The profusion of foliage and treetops in the middle ground gives way to views of mountains and sky in the distance. Compositional elements of diferent sizes and textures are combined into a cohesive pictorial whole.

As a young man, George Robertson attracted the notice of William Beckford of Somerley who became his patron and took the artist to Europe to study the masters of landscape painting.2 The Beckford family had a long connection with Jamaica, having amassed a vast fortune through ownership of sugar plantations. Around 1773 or 1774, Beckford asked Robertson to accompany him to the island, where the artist created views of Beckford’s properties and other Jamaican scenery.3 Robertson likely created pencil sketches, chalk drawings, and watercolors en plein air during his time in Jamaica, creating further watercolors or oil paintings based on these studies after he returned home to England around 1775.4 Several of these Jamaican works were exhibited at the Society of Artists of Great Britain in London between the years 1775 and 1778.5

As some of the frst landscapes of Jamaica to be disseminated to a wider English audience, Robertson’s works had a marked efect on later artists’ portrayals of the island. Individuals such as James Hakewill and Joseph Bartholomew Kidd who visited the island in the nineteenth century may have looked to Robertson’s images as they tried to make sense of the new landscape in which they had found themselves

A statement included at the bottom of each sheet reads: “Drawn on this spot and painted by George Robertson,” suggesting a documentary approach. As one of the earliest English artists of note to actually set

A View in the Island of Jamaica, of Part of the River Cobre near Spanish Town, 1778

A View of Port Royal and Kingston in the Island of Jamaica, 1783

foot on the island, Robertson was anxious to tout the authenticity of his views. Moreover, in the era of Enlightenment when frsthand experience was considered integral to the production of knowledge—but travel was still prohibitively difcult—audiences needed assurance that they were witnessing “real” views of distant locales by artists who had actually seen the places they depicted with their own eyes.

While elements such as topographical and botanical accuracy were important, an artist working in the picturesque mode also needed to be able to edit the scenes he encountered, to curate the disparate details of a given site into a balanced, aesthetically pleasing whole. The ability to “edit” was especially important when working in the Caribbean, where new and exotic-looking fora and fauna could easily overwhelm European senses. Uninitiated viewers appreciated an artist who could capture Jamaica’s natural exuberance, while also giving the eye a few familiar pictorial motifs—a meandering stream or a blasted tree—on which to rest.

Francis Skelly’s A View of Port Royal and Kingston in the Island of Jamaica, another late-eighteenth-century depiction of the island, also combines the documentary and picturesque.6 Like Robertson’s preparatory drawings, Skelly’s sketch was likely created on the spot. The artist also made an efort to arrange his view with compositional principles in mind—palm trees frame the scene at left and overlapping mountains recede into the distance at right.

If Skelly’s scene represents a singular impression by an amateur artist passing through the Caribbean, then Robertson’s engravings reveal a more highly developed aesthetic agenda. Published as a series, distributed to the public, available in colored versions, and later associated with Beckford’s treatise explicitly describing Jamaican scenery in terms of the picturesque, we can see Robertson’s views as part of a concerted efort to portray exotic scenery—and even the troublesome institutions of colonialism and slavery—as aesthetically pleasing and, therefore, harmonious and natural.

bree lehman

1 For biographies of George Robertson, see “Obituary of Considerable Persons; with Biographical Anecdotes,” The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle 58, no. 2 (October 1788): 934–35 and C. F. Bell, “Fresh Light on Some WatercolourPainters of the Old British School, Derived from the Collection and Papers of James Moore, F.S.A.,” The Fifth Volume of the Walpole Society (1917): 54–59.

2 William Beckford of Somerley (also spelled “Somerly ”) was the frst cousin of the better-known William Beckford of Fonthill Abbey (English, 1760–1844). For biographies of Beckford of Somerley, see “Biographical Sketch of William Beckford, Esq., Formerly of Somerly Hall in Sufolk, and Hertford in Jamaica, and Lately of Han’s Place, Pimlico,” The Monthly Mirror (May 1799): 260–64; and Richard B. Sheridan, “Planter and Historian: The Career of William Beckford of Jamaica and England, 1744–1799,” Jamaican Historical Review 4 (1964): 36–58.

3 In 1790, Beckford published a treatise on Jamaica entitled A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica: With Remarks Upon the Cultivation of the Sugar-Cane Throughout the Dif erent Seasons of the Year, and Chiefy Considered in a Picturesque Point of View; Also, Observations and Refections Upon What Would Probably be the Consequences of an Abolition of the Slave-Trade, and the Emancipation of the Slaves. Although Beckford had intended to use the engravings of Robertson’s Jamaica works to illustrate this publication, he was ultimately unable to include them due to a strained fnancial situation—he was incarcerated in Fleet Prison as a debtor at the time. See Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica . . . (London: T. and J. Egerton, 1790), 1: x–xii.

4 An unsigned oil painting attributed to George Robertson and nearly identical in composition to the CPPC’s engraving of the River Cobre is in the collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica in Kingston (76.150). A photograph of a painting somewhat diferent in composition, but clearly depicting the same scene, is in the George Robertson fle in the Frick Art Reference Library Photoarchive. The latter painting is now unlocated.

5 Algernon Graves, The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760–1791/The Free Society of Artists, 1761–1783: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and Their Work from the Foundation of the Societies to 1791 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1907), 215.

6 The artist is presumably Francis Skelly (Scottish, c. 1751–1793) who was the son of the Reverend John Skelly and Lady Betty Gordon (Scottish, c. 1720–1769) and the grandson of Alexander, the second Duke of Gordon (Scottish, c. 1678–1728). Skelly served in the British Army during the American Revolutionary War and was stationed in South Carolina shortly before this sketch was made. He later served in India and died in Calcutta. For Skelly’s genealogy, see G. F. A., The Ancient and Noble Family of the Savages of the Ards (London: Marcus Ward & Co., Limited, 1888), 242. Regarding his activities during the Revolution, see Richard K. Showman, ed., The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, vol. 11 (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 2000). On his death, see “Marriages and Deaths of Considerable Persons,” The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle 64, no. 5 (May 1794): 480.

Daniel Lerpinière (1745–1785), United Kingdom, engraver

After George Robertson (c. 1748–1788), United Kingdom, painter

John Boydell (1719–1804), United Kingdom, publisher

A View in the Island of Jamaica, of Part of the River Cobre near Spanish Town, 1778

Line-engraving, 38.1 × 52.7 cm (15 × 20 O inches)

No. 1 of a series of six engravings titled Views in the Island of Jamaica

Francis Skelly (active late eighteenth century), United Kingdom

A View of Port Royal and Kingston in the Island of Jamaica, 1783 Ink on paper, 16.8 × 26 cm (6 X × 10¼ inches)

James Mason

Along with a view of the River Cobre, this engraving by James Mason is part of the series Views in the Island of Jamaica based on the works of English landscape painter George Robertson. Robertson’s depiction of the springhead of Roaring River in Westmoreland Parish features a large tree on a hillock framing the upper-left portion of the composition, as well as palm trees and a winding path that direct the viewer’s eye across the river in the middle distance and into the clearing beyond.1

In this work, human fgures take on more of a central role. In the foreground, a woman, clad in a white shirt, dark skirt, head scarf, and necklace stands with a basket balanced on her hip. A man kneeling at her feet ofers her an item—perhaps a bunch of plantains—from his own basket. Beyond, another fgure coaxes a herd of cows along the path and across the shallow river.

From the fgures’ dress, occupations, and darker skin tones, we surmise that they represent the African and Creole slaves who were forced to work on colonial Jamaica’s sugar plantations. For all the horrible injustices and cruelty that characterized the institution of slavery, this is hardly a scene of duress—in fact, the only allusion to coercion of any kind is the dog barking excitedly at the livestock attempting to ford the river. While some of the fgures in Robertson’s engravings do appear at work—carrying loads, driving or herding animals, rolling barrels, and so forth—many, in keeping with pastoral landscape traditions, also appear to be at leisure—talking to companions or resting at the side of a road.

Including fgures in landscape compositions was also a common convention of the picturesque. In William Gilpin’s series of essays on picturesque beauty, he maintains that fgures can help to “enliven” a scene by providing anecdotal ornament. However, ultimately an artist must take care to keep his fgures small and unobtrusive—the landscape painter’s concern is not with human dramas, after all, but with natural and aesthetic ones.2

In the last few decades, scholars have pointed out the ways in which the aesthetics of colonial landscapes served to enforce existing power structures just as efectively as political or economic measures. Elizabeth A. Bohls, for example, states:

Aesthetics argues without arguing: its vocabulary of visible surfaces represents power relationships as natural and unchallengeable precisely by casting them as irrelevant to the compelling business of the quest for beauty through the senses and the imagination . . . aesthetic discourse(s) . . . cooperate with the visible, superfcial sign of race and discourses of racial inferiority to legitimate—and even render seductively appealing—the relations of power, violence, and brutality that characterize this colonial system.3

In other words, by cultivating the concept of the “imperial picturesque” and considering the aesthetic rather than social implications of the enslaved black body in the colonial landscape, artists efectively underwrote and reifed the sinister practices that brought about the enslavement of those bodies in the frst place.4

As the inscription on each engraving in the Views in the Island of Jamaica series states, Robertson’s scenes were dedicated to his patron, William Beckford of Somerley. Beckford, who owned sugar plantations on the island, brought the artist to Jamaica in the early 1770s for the purpose of depicting its particular beauties. In 1790, Beckford also published a lengthy treatise on Jamaica that further described the island’s picturesque qualities and even argued against increasing calls for the abolition of slavery in the British colonies.

Given the pressures of antislavery activists, there was a substantial market among plantation owners and their extended networks for images that depicted the plantation as picturesque, peaceful, and productive. Nevertheless, publishing these works was by no means an easy or inexpensive proposition. As Tim Barringer notes, “Considerable amounts of capital, both fnancial and ideological, were invested in these images, in the production of which artists and their patrons colluded in an attempt to naturalize the moral injustice enshrined in laws that made some men and women the property of others.”5 In short, these projects often amounted to public relations campaigns through which those fnancially and personally invested in colonialism attempted to ensure that it continued to endure.

bree lehman

A View in the Island of Jamaica, of the Spring-Head of Roaring River on the Estate of William Beckford Esq., 1778

James Mason (c. 1723–1805), United Kingdom, engraver

After George Robertson (c. 1748–1788), United Kingdom, painter

John Boydell (1719–1804), United Kingdom, publisher

A View in the Island of Jamaica, of the Spring-Head of Roaring River on the Estate of William Beckford Esq., 1778

Line-engraving, 38.1 × 52.7 cm (15 × 20 O inches)

No. 5 of a series of six engravings titled Views in the Island of Jamaica

1 An oil painting attributed to George Robertson and nearly identical in composition to the CPPC’s engraving of the springhead of Roaring River was in the collection of Wallace Campbell of Kingston, Jamaica, as of 2012. For an illustration and account of this work, see the exhibition catalogue for Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, edited by Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 280–81.

2 See, for example, William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape: To which is Added a Poem, On Landscape Painting (London: R. Blamire, 1792), 66, 78.

3 Elizabeth A. Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism: Janet Schaw in the West Indies, 1774–1775,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 390.

4 For a discussion of the “imperial picturesque,” see Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

5 Tim Barringer, “Picturesque Prospects and the Labor of the Enslaved,” in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 45.

Peter Bernhard Wilhelm Heine

The vast expanse of water, showing the horizon in the foreground, is bordered by beautiful mountains to the right and left. While to the left an enormous mountain chain leads towards Costa Rica, in the middle of the lake the two large volcanoes of Ometepe Island rise majestically into the clouds. To the left, southward, the mouth of the Rio Frio is encircled by an opulent richness of plants, and clusters of trees are blanketed with purple blossoms to the right. . . . Great God! This country is a paradise. . . .1

So wrote Peter Bernhard Wilhelm Heine, a consummate traveler and chronicler of foreign landscapes and peoples, as he recorded his awe of the landscape in Nicaragua in his 1853 publication Wanderbilder aus Centralamerika [Travel Pictures from Central America].

Heine’s painting depicts a harmonious pastoral scene in the foreground, with a group of farm animals in the center, surrounded by meticulously rendered fora. Just beyond the bucolic scene, two fgures on horseback approach a small village composed of several buildings, and the rest of the herd grazes, barely visible, on the shores of the lake. The scene is set on the banks of Lake Nicaragua, identifable through the expansive nature of the lake and inclusion of the mountainous Ometepe Island that occupies the right side of the composition. Typically, Heine includes two palm trees that hover far above the town. Traveling through Central America, Heine saw many varieties of palm trees and, like so many artists before and after him, viewed them as synonymous with the tropics.2 While Heine was well known for his meticulous and accurate depictions of fora and fauna, he probably emphasized the palm tree here to accentuate the tropical setting of this otherwise ambiguous location. However, the palm tree fts into the landscape rather than overpowering it, perhaps demonstrating Heine’s interest in using the palm tree to locate the scene in the tropics while maintaining the illusion of an accurate, meticulously rendered scene.

The circumstances that brought Heine to Central America are indicative of his ceaseless interest in adventure, and his willingness to travel to the far reaches of the world to chronicle foreign landscapes and peoples. Adventure found Heine through a chance meeting with Ephraim George Squier, an antiquarian and diplomat, in 1851. Squier, appointed consul to Central America, made three trips to Nicaragua between 1849 and 1853, as he planned to study the remains of preColumbian peoples in Central America. In preparation for his second trip in 1851, Squier asked Heine to travel to Central America with him

on Lake Nicaragua with Ometepe Island in the Distance, 1856

as the illustrator of these studies. The drawings Heine completed while there became the basis for exhibition paintings such as this one, and also illustrated Squier’s books. In addition, Heine collected plants, birds, and reptiles, visited the route of the proposed canal across Nicaragua, and chronicled his experiences in Travel Pictures from Central America, the frst of numerous publications Heine would pen.

That Heine’s publication received public acceptance was indicative of the growing role of the artist in travel accounts. His account was part of a wider trend in the mid-1850s that granted the landscape painter the status of travel reporter, and included the tropical world as a place of interest. In addition, the paintings that Heine completed after he returned from his adventures helped to both legitimize his travels and garner further public interest in Central America. The response to Heine’s 1857 studio exhibition made clear that the art-going public was both invested in the tropical world, and confdent that traveler artists such as Heine faithfully recorded the landscape of the tropics in their paintings.

In addition to exposing him to a completely new landscape, Heine’s experience in Central America would ultimately lead to further travel to many other distant lands. Heine stood in for Squier as consul and agreed to deliver ofcial government documents to Washington in the hope that these services would help secure for him the opportunity to join the expedition to open the ports of Japan. The artist proposed this idea as he laid the documents before President Fillmore in 1852, and the president was obliged to refer Heine to Matthew Calbraith Perry, the expedition’s commander. Within months, Heine left aboard the USS Mississippi to embark on a historic journey to Japan.

By the end of his life, Heine had traveled to fve continents and published numerous books to share his experiences with the world. Although he is perhaps best known today for his illustrations of Perry’s Japan expedition, it was Heine’s trip to Central America that frst exposed him to a landscape unlike anything he had experienced in his native Germany or the United States. Heine’s statement in 1853 that “I am an artist, and have been traveling only as such, for the love of art and the joy of scientifc research,” served as his motto throughout his life, as he traveled around the globe to document the fora and fauna of foreign lands.3

erika nelson

Scene

1 Peter Bernhard Wilhelm Heine, Wanderbilder aus Centralamerika (Leipzig: Hermann Constenoble, 1853), 84, 105.

2 For more on the prevalence of the palm tree in the work of traveler artists, see Katherine Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 13–19.

3 Heine, Wanderbilder aus Centralamerika, 45.

Peter Bernhard Wilhelm Heine (1827–1885), Germany Scene on Lake Nicaragua with Ometepe Island in the Distance, 1856 Oil on canvas, 134.6 × 181 cm (53 × 71 N inches)

PORTS AND SEASCAPES

Sweeping views of harbors, closely observed ships, and references to the diverse local population in coastal cities were typical elements of nineteenth-century port scenes in Latin America, many of which were completed by travelers to the region. In the nineteenth century amid bourgeoning independence movements, the global presence of Latin American countries became increasingly signifcant. Images of ports emphasized maritime activity, either military or commercial, suggesting the global connections of these newly independent and increasingly cosmopolitan locations.

The genre of marine painting traditionally included portraits of ships that accurately delineated the details of those vessels, as well as naval battles. Artists who painted seascapes usually had knowledge of ships, topography, and mapping. Primarily infuenced by the tradition of marine painting in Flanders and the Netherlands that celebrated Dutch maritime achievements, seascapes became widespread in Europe and America by the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, some artists broke from earlier conventions to create more imaginative and romanticized marine views.1

Many Latin American seascapes follow traditional conventions, documenting maritime activity in the busy ports that became hubs of commerce. Many artists of marine scenes worked aboard ships, precisely documenting the port’s topography and city as viewed from the vessel. De León’s watercolor, Port of La Guaira (1878), features anchored ships whose masts fy fags of nations including the United States, Spain, France, and the German Empire, indicating the prominence of global exchange in this Venezuelan port. The artist captured the sharp ascent of the landscape from the coast to the mountain peaks while including palm trees that allude to the tropical setting. De León also delineated the architecture of the port, including El Vigía fortress that overlooks the harbor.

Alternately, artists portrayed sweeping panoramas of the harbor as viewed from land. These bird’s-eye views resulted in accurate or idealized depictions of port cities and the surrounding local topography, and often included details of fora to indicate a tropical location. In addition to capturing the commercial activity and fourishing city of the port, these scenes may include fgures in the foreground to provide an entrance point for the viewer. As port cities became increasingly cosmopolitan and diverse in population, foregrounded fgural groups ofered foreign viewers information about the various classes and races of people inhabiting the port cities of Latin America. Merchant class

De León, Port of La Guaira, 1878

Watercolor on paper, 41 × 79 cm (16 V × 31 V inches)

creoles might be juxtaposed with members of the indigenous populations, while other scenes depicted the labors of African slaves to demonstrate the productivity of the land surrounding the port.

As gateways for trade and immigration, port cities witnessed a thriving merchant class and proliferation of foreign travelers. If port cities were not the fnal destination for travelers, then they were sometimes necessary stopovers for ships on longer journeys. For example, the ports of Rio de Janeiro, Valparaíso, and Guayaquil frequently provided respite for travelers on their way to California during the Gold Rush. Some artists were simply visitors who recorded their impressions of foreign ports. While some seascape painters created works that remained in Latin America, others produced picturesque views that were later transported back to Europe or the United States.

Early nineteenth-century calls for independence in Latin America were fueled by a desire among the growing merchant classes for increased trade opportunities. When independence was achieved, maritime trade opened up to an increasing number of foreign nations beyond the former controlling powers of Spain and Portugal. These independence movements fourished in more cosmopolitan Latin American cities such as ports that witnessed an increasingly diverse population and an emergent maritime economy.

caroline gillaspie

1 See David Cordingly, Marine Painting in England, 1700–1900 (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973); and James Taylor, Marine Painting: Images of Sail, Sea and Shore (London: Studio Editions, 1995).

Alessandro Ciccarelli

Léon Jean- Baptis

te Sabatier

Alessandro Ciccarelli arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1843 as a member of the entourage of Sicilian princess Teresa Cristina, the bride of Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II. By 1849 Ciccarelli had moved to Santiago, Chile, to become the frst Director of the Chilean Beaux Arts Academy, but he left his most famous paintings behind in Rio.1 Two landscapes of Guanabara Bay including View of Rio de Janeiro, in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and a strikingly similar scene in the collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, demonstrate Ciccarelli’s particular manner of combining landscape and genre painting to create a picturesque fantasia. Pufy pink clouds bathed in the golden glow of late afternoon hang over Ciccarelli’s rendering of Rio de Janeiro’s characteristic mountains and bay, while in the foreground the artist includes a classicized vignette of an Afro-Brazilian couple. Combining these elements creates a painting that is more poetic caprice than reality. The distortion in the shape of Rio’s two iconic mountains, Pão de Açucar (which is too steep) and Corcovado (which is too fat) reveal Ciccarelli’s technique of painting in the studio rather than on site. These inaccuracies also suggest that Ciccarelli chose to paint a personal interpretation of Rio de Janeiro that represented the city as a paradise removed from the constraints of time and modern sociality, rather than a naturalistic view of the nascent metropolis.

Aside from the Afro-Brazilians in the foreground—inexplicably, wearing togas—the landscape depicted by Ciccarelli is almost entirely depopulated. This implies that Rio was still a sleepy colonial town when, in reality, it was already growing into an international trading hub. One laboring Afro-Brazilian in the middle ground, some camoufaged colonial architecture, and a few small sailing ships are the only hints of cosmopolitan life that Ciccarelli provides. Rather than painting the contemporary city, these details place the scene in the idyllic past, before the opening of the ports fooded Rio with foreign merchants.2 In the place of foreign traders vying for Brazilian raw goods, Ciccarelli includes relics of colonial and pre-colonial Brazil. The primal gesture of the Afro-Brazilian man, ofering a dangling lizard as present, pet, or repast to his female companion, and his Greco-Roman garb, casts him as a remnant of a classicized Latin American antiquity. Rather than depict the harsh realities of colonial slavery and the global mercantile system that it supported, Ciccarelli’s slaves are exotic stafage added for pastoral efect. As a result the image is bucolic and timeless, and the Brazil it depicts becomes a primordial Eden, untouched by civilization.

View of Rio de Janeiro, c. 1840

View of the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, 1850

Ciccarelli was not the only European artist to imagine the Latin American landscape as a tropical paradise.3 Léon Jean-Baptiste Sabatier (French, d. 1887), Ciccarelli’s contemporary, painted an equally embellished View of the Bay of Rio de Janeiro in 1850.4 In Sabatier’s painting, the topography of Corcovado and Pão de Açucar are again misrepresented, the latter being almost completely deformed from its recognizable, round “sugarloaf” shape. Sabatier gilds the scene with a golden dramatic sunset over a rough sea, whose choppiness is sublime in a way uncharacteristic of the usually placid Guanabara Bay. In the foreground a ship flled with men of African descent, possibly slaves, lists and rolls in the waves, prow pointed to the glowing frmament. Behind the ships, the city of Rio de Janeiro sprawls across the bay’s rolling hills. The individual buildings melt into a singular mass, distinguished by the twin towers of a colonial Catholic church. Sabatier repeats Ciccarelli’s composition with Corcovado in back, the city in the middle ground, and foregrounded Afro-Brazilians serving as symbols of the exotic. His inclusion of several large sailing vessels grounds Sabatier’s painting in a more contemporary setting than Ciccarelli’s painting, but his tone remains sublime and otherworldly. One of the most important details in this work is the French fag that fies over the main vessel and is highlighted in almost the exact center of the canvas. By giving pride of place to his national imagery over that of the Brazilians, Sabatier denies Brazilian autonomy, claiming the landscape of Rio de Janeiro for the French. Instead of depicting Brazil as a modern nation of growing wealth and prestige, Sabatier ordains it for the expansion of French mercantile interests.

Taken together, Ciccarelli and Sabatier’s images move away from the faithfully realistic approach of the artist documentarians like John B. Dale and Johann Moritz Rugendas toward a nostalgic and symbolic view of Brazil, and are more interested in expressing the landscape romantically than in precisely recording its natural and man-made features. These picturesque views of Brazil interpreted the landscape as a tropical paradise without a civilized center. But as the century progressed and more Brazilians began to create their own images of their country, the Romantic views of Ciccarelli, Sabatier, and other early European visitors would give way to an image of Brazil concentrated on its urban growth and cosmopolitan nature.5

danielle stewart

1 Until recently the CPPC’s painting was attributed to the Frenchman Raymond Auguste Quinsac Monvoisin (French, 1790–1870) who lived in Rio from 1840–48. In many ways his career paralleled that of Alessandro Ciccarelli—Monvoisin arrived in Brazil around the same time as Ciccarelli and was originally ofered the position of frst director of the Beaux Arts Academy in Chile. For more on the intersecting careers of the two artists see Valéia Alves Esteves Lima, “Alessandro Ciccarelli e Quinsac Monvoisin: Arte e Política na América Oitocentista,” Encontro de História da Arte—IFC/UNICAMP (2009): 261–262.

2 With the arrival of the Portuguese imperial family in 1808, Rio had acquired international importance. With a retinue of 15,000, Emperor D. João VI and his court increased the population of the colonial village by nearly a third. In Salvador the Emperor signed into law the Ato da Abertura dos Portos [Act of Opening the Ports], re-opening Brazilian ports after three centuries of closure. Opening the ports created competition for the Brazilian raw goods market among the French, Germans, Americans, and especially the British, who became Brazil’s principal trading partners. European immigrants also focked to Brazil, especially in the 1820s when passages for European settlers were subsidized by the Brazilian government. Also contributing to the rapid population growth at this time was the still-unabolished slave trade. By the time Brazil declared its independence in 1822, the population of Rio had doubled from about 50,000 in 1808 to around 100,000. At the time of the frst national census in 1872, the city’s population had almost tripled to 274,972. See Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, “Romanticismo tropical,” in Latin American Literary Review 25, no. 50 (July–Dec. 1997): 47; Boris Kossoy and Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro, O Olhar Europeau: O Negro na Iconografa Brasileira do Século XIX (São Paulo: Edusp, 1994), 19; Leslie Bethell, ed., Brazil: Empire and Republic, 1822–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 46; and Emilia Viotti Da Costa, ed., The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 183.

3 For an extended analysis of the myths and perceptions surrounding the New World from an American point of view, see Katherine Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1989), 9–30.

4 Almost nothing is known about Sabatier including whether or not he ever traveled to Brazil.

5 Specifcally, photographer Marc Ferrez photographed downtown Rio de Janeiro in addition to the natural beauty of its surrounding landscape. As Brazilian historian of photography Gilberto Ferrez (Marc’s grandson) points out, technology and urban development were subjects of fascination for early photographers: “Photographers were deeply concerned with documenting more than just the physical expansion throughout the land. The love of technology, felt so keenly by the Emperor himself, can be seen in photographs like those Ferrez took of the Minas and Rio Railway.” Gilberto Ferrez and Weston J. Naef, Pioneer Photographers of Brazil (New York: The Center for Inter-American Relations, 1976), 27. See also Bia and Pedro Corrêa do Lago, Os Fotógrafos do Império (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Capivara, 2005), 199.

Alessandro Ciccarelli (1811–1879), Italy

View of Rio de Janeiro, c. 1840

Oil on canvas, 56.5 × 81.3 cm (22 N × 32 inches)

Léon Jean-Baptiste Sabatier (d. 1887), France

View of the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, 1850 Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 113 cm (32 × 44 K inches)

John B. Dale Artist unidentified

Sketches of Guanabara Bay in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros illustrate the cosmopolitan life of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro and its importance as an international trading hub Glória Church, Rio de Janeiro is a large sketch by an unidentifed artist depicting Glória Hill, which juts out over Flamengo Beach near the heart of the city. The focal point of the drawing is a little Baroque church that sits atop the hill, one of the city’s oldest and most distinctive buildings. The church was the favorite place of worship of the Portuguese royal family after their arrival in Rio de Janeiro in 1808, serving as an imperial chapel. In the drawing, the church’s royal signifcance and architectural ties to the past make it a symbol of history and tradition. It also manifests Rio de Janeiro’s sophistication, since the city was an important trade hub and the only imperial capital on the South American continent.

In the sketch sailing ships are on the waters of the bay. The port was extremely busy throughout the nineteenth century, both because it was the primary point of Brazilian trade and by virtue of being a stopover on the voyage from Europe to the Far East.1 The slope below the Glória Church is scattered with modern buildings, demonstrating the liveliness of the growing city. Although the exact fgures for Rio’s population in the early nineteenth century are not recorded, at the time of the frst national census in 1872, the city ’s population was already 274,972.2 Amongst the busy boats and buildings, the artist includes a small vignette, perhaps a self-portrait, of a man in the act of sketching the scene. The unknown author of this work seems to be indicating his physical presence in the scene, demonstrating that this bustling port is the real Rio by the accuracy of his drawing and his witnessing selfportrait. The artist is not crafting an imaginary vision of an exotic wonderland, but recording the palpable reality of the burgeoning capital.

John B. Dale’s Rio is a veristic vision of the port city.3 Instead of depicting Rio’s cultural landmarks, Dale’s interest is Rio’s mercantile and military life.4 Dale was a naval artist and lieutenant on the USS Constitution who traveled to Brazil between 1838 and 1842, charged with protecting American trade interests abroad.5 The matter-offactness of his drawing is presumably related to the seriousness of his mission in Rio. In Dale’s sketch the waters of Guanabara Bay are littered with ships. A fortifed precipice in the background was likely one of the naval bases protecting Guanabara Bay. Block letters in the foreground spell out the simple, direct caption: “RIO.”6

Although very diferent in tone, Dale’s stoic version of the Rio harbor is closely linked with the more vivacious version of the bay by

Rio, 1838–42

Glória Church, Rio de Janeiro, 19th century

the unidentifed artist above. Both are feld sketches, likely done on site. Together they demonstrate Rio’s multivalence: at once a growing city, an imperial capital, a trading port, a naval base, and an international harbor. These interpretations of the city are especially important because they contradict the way many European visitors to Rio de Janeiro saw the city. For most, early-nineteenth-century Rio was a South American arcadia.

danielle

stewart

1 Luciana de Lima Martins, “Navigating in Tropical Waters: British Maritime Views of Rio de Janeiro,” Imago Mundo 50 (1998), 142.

2 By 1890 this fgure would double to 522,651. At the beginning of the twentieth century in 1906 Rio was well on its way to a million residents with a population of 811,443. As early as 1880 the frst of Rio’s famous favelas began spreading over its hillsides, forever changing the view. Manuel C. Teixeira, “A habitação popular no século XIX—características morfológicas, a transmissão de modelos: as ilhas do Porto e os cortiços do Rio de Janeiro,” Análise Social 29, no. 127 (1994): 571.

3 There is almost no documentation of John Dale’s artistic production. The only information available are auction records and a single reproduction in the artist’s fle at the Frick Art Reference Library.

4 Since Dale’s oeuvre is poorly documented, it is hard to know if he made other sketches that capitalized on Rio’s natural landscape. The rounded Rio hills would certainly have been highly visible from sea, even if Dale never debarked, so he could have made landscape sketches if he chose. It is interesting that Dale seems to have found the commerce around the port more deserving of representation than its characteristic natural beauty.

5 John B. Dale artist’s fle, Frick Art Reference Library.

6 Dale’s was to be among the last strategically important topographic sketches of the city; at the end of 1840 Father Louis Compte brought the frst daguerreotype camera to Brazil, shifting the preferred medium of documentation from sketching to photography.

John B. Dale (1814–1848), United States Rio, 1838–42

Graphite on paper, 7 × 12.1 cm (2 O × 4 O inches)

Artist unidentifed, Brazil

Glória Church, Rio de Janeiro, 19th century

Sepia ink and graphite on paper

28.5 × 40.6 cm (11 N × 16 inches)

Johann Moritz Rugendas

Chile has an especially important place in Johann Moritz Rugendas’s long journey in America. He arrived in that country from Mexico toward the middle of 1834, and stayed there until the end of 1842. For more than eight years he traveled through the most diverse territories of this young republic. He stayed in the south, on the border of the Araucanian territory; crossed the Andes in the central region, between Santiago and Mendoza; and ventured into the arid mining region in the north. In all these places he was the great artistic pioneer who defned motifs of interest and even established picturesque routes. Without exaggeration, one can state that Rugendas was the frst skillful and artistically talented painter who dedicated an important part of his work to illustrating the land and peoples of Chile.

The work of this traveler artist was amply received by Chilean society. He attained commissions, particularly in the genre of portrait painting. But he also gained prestige as a history painter, especially when he composed a large painting of the Battle of Maipú, a crucial episode in Chile’s fght for independence; this work of art earned Rugendas signifcant standing within the historical iconography of the nation and is still a remarkable piece of the Government Palace’s decorative legacy. His drawings were also used by the French naturalist Claudio Gay to illustrate the monumental Atlas of the Physical and Political History of Chile, published in Paris in 1854.1

It seems plausible that Rugendas considered establishing himself in Chile. In fact, he didn’t behave like someone who was merely passing through, and he built very intimate relationships on two occasions. However, his professional life in these lands never provided the material means to allow him to make a living from his art according to his expectations. From the intense correspondence he maintained with Carmen Arriagada—who was his lover and a permanent confdant—we know that he left Chile because of his frustration with several projects he had embarked on in that country, and which he aimed to pursue in the apparently more promising environment of Peru.2 However, he did not fare much better there.

During his stay in Chile, the artist lived between the capital and the port city of Valparaíso. Towards 1838, in Santiago, he began to publish a series of magazines with the purpose of illustrating typical costumes of Chile (Álbum de trajes chilenos). This project had hardly begun when it was interrupted after the publication of the frst booklet when the publisher went bankrupt. This editorial fasco, together with an accident sufered by Rugendas during his trip through the Andes, weakened

his disposition and capacity to face the ebb and fow of a traveling artist’s life.

Faced with this less than favorable situation, the artist chose to establish himself in Valparaíso where there was good commercial activity, which for the interests of a painter meant a changing clientele of travelers and merchants with high purchasing power. In fact, besides teaching drawing, in Valparaíso he received commissions for portraits and was able to sell views of the port and other national subjects from his ample repertory with some frequency. This allowed him to live modestly, something that no longer seemed possible in Santiago.

These are the circumstances in which we must place the View of Valparaíso, dated in the last year of Rugendas’s stay in Chile. The view is taken from a hill at the western end of the bay. From a relatively high viewpoint, the eye is directed to the ships in the harbor and to the silhouette of barren hills that descend toward the sea, leaving only a narrow strip where the city is located. In the urban center, to the right of this composition, the tower of the old customs building stands out, highlighted by the white of its façade. The city’s buildings merge together with the ochre tone of the earth and the rocks of the coast.

The foreground of the painting shows two groups of people dressed in elegant outfts. They are probably Rugendas’s client posing with his family and close relations, who are portrayed with the port as background. Among these circumspect men and women, who are conversing without paying attention to their surroundings, the painter includes a couple of locals, giving the composition an additional picturesque favor.

pablo diener

1 For Rugendas’s Chilean work, see Pablo Diener, Rugendas: Su viaje por Chile, 1834–1842 (Santiago de Chile: Origo Ediciones, 2012).

2 Rugendas’s correspondence with Carmen Arriagada was published in full by Oscar Pinochet de la Barra, Carmen Arriagada, cartas de una mujer apasionada (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1989).

View of Valparaíso, 1842

Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858), Germany

View of Valparaíso, 1842

Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 92 cm (25 × 36 N inches)

Artist unidentified

After the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70) in which Paraguay was defeated by the allied forces of Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina, the country was established under a new constitution, and its new president Salvador Jovellanos governed under the protection of occupying Brazilian forces from 1871 to 1874. The painting English Emigrants Disembarking from the Steamship Cisne at Asunción, with a Brazilian Gunboat on the River Paraguay Beyond depicts some of the efects of Paraguay’s treaty with Brazil and Uruguay that, among its many articles, established new boundaries and formalized commercial relations. A key stipulation of the treaty was that Paraguay would repay the cost of the war to the alliance. Economically crippled by the confict, Paraguay took out two foreign loans, contracted through the London banking concern Mssrs. Robinson, Fleming, & Company in 1871 and 1872. In an attempt to protect their investment, the frm sought to establish an English colony of Lincolnshire farmers in Paraguay in 1873.

English Emigrants represents the crowded port of Asunción on the Paraguay River, a city that was the locus of much political unrest during the nineteenth century.1 British emigrants descend from the boat while, on shore, children play, peasants work, organized police supervise the port, and firtatious Guaraní women loiter. Seventy percent of the Paraguayan population, mainly Guaraní, was exterminated during the war. As represented here, the few survivors were pressed to fnd ways to survive. The implied contrast between family and sensuality is shown in the juxtaposition of the lone Gauraní women with the arriving European women accompanied by their families. Both the emigrants and the Gauraní women are presented using the tradition of costumbrismo, a genre of nineteenth-century painting from this region that sought to depict everyday life.

That the artist has represented the British, Brazilian, and Paraguayan fags speaks clearly of Paraguay’s political situation after the war. The Paraguayan fag placed on the customshouse indicates the country’s recently reclaimed territory. The large Paraguayan fag fying from the stern of the boat suggests that the boat, named Cisne (Swan), was registered in Paraguay. During the war, in March of 1866, a boat called the Cisne had been attacked while passing though Itapirú, the location of a fort that was used to control access to Argentina through the Paraná River. The small British fags hanging from one of the masts of the sailing vessels of the boat indicate that English passengers were on board. The Brazilian fag hanging from the mast of a gunboat in the river behind the passenger ship reminds us that, after the war, the Brazilian army occupied Paraguay until 1876.

English Emigrants Disembarking from the Steamship Cisne at Asunción, with a Brazilian Gunboat on the River Paraguay Beyond, 1873

The buildings on the shore clearly identify this as the port of Asunción. Before the war, the government of Carlos Antonio López Insfrán, in place from 1844 to 1862, had brought European engineers and architects to Asunción to transform the postcolonial city with architecture that refected the modern taste for Italianate neoclassicism. The largest pink building that we can see behind the boats and crowds is the Palace of Government—also known as Palacio de los López—whose main façade fronts the street, away from us. Its back, seen here from the vantage of the Paraguay River, is rendered in great detail. Beyond it, toward the far side of the painting, can be seen the Oratorio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, named in honor of the city’s patron. The buildings’ construction by the Italian architect Alejandro Ravizza and the British engineer Alonso Taylor is indicative of the wave of European immigration to Paraguay during the nineteenth century. On the other side of the Palacio de los López is the customshouse, also depicted in great detail, and surrounded by crowds.

Although the authorship of this painting is unknown, the discrepancy between the brushstrokes in the background and foreground suggests it could have been painted by more than one hand. The river, the boats, and all of the people have been loosely painted, while the architecture, especially the Palacio de los López, has been painted with precise, detailed strokes. European artists who had been invited to Paraguay during López’s governance to execute building decoration stayed in Asunción, where they taught drawing and painting to Paraguayan artists. Like the unknown authors of this painting, those artists were probably highly skilled in the practice of representing buildings in great detail.2 The scene on the river depicted in English Emigrants and the specifcity of the architectural rendering shown in it are indications of the political and artistic context in which the painting was made.

1 Branislava Susnik, Una visión socio-antropológica del Paraguay del siglo XIX: Parte Primera (Asución: Museo Etnográfco Andres Barbero, 1992), 11.

2 The Italian architect Alejandro Ravizza and his brother Cayetano Ravizza, as well as the French artist Julio Mornet, taught drawing, design, and painting to Paraguayan artists such as Aurelio García and Santurio Rios.

silvia benedetti

unidentifed

Artist

English Emigrants Disembarking from the Steamship Cisne at Asunción, with a Brazilian Gunboat on the River Paraguay Beyond, 1873

Oil on canvas, 74.3 × 125.1 cm (29 N × 49 N inches)

Juan Manuel Blanes

Juan Manuel Blanes was a chronicler of his time, depicting his social and political environment in history paintings of Uruguay’s battle for independence, and genre scenes of rural life on the plains of Uruguay and Argentina. Blanes’s paintings of the mestizo population of gauchos conveyed their independent, rebellious, and roaming lifestyle, and became a national icon of freedom and heroism for post-civil-war Uruguayans.1 His seascapes demonstrate another aspect of Blanes’s perception of his native landscape: whereas he paid special attention to the background of his gaucho scenes, using the fat, brushy landscape of the pampas as a means to convey national identity, in seascapes like Marina del Sur, Blanes surveys an alternate perspective of Latin America—from its edges. His interest in the coastline of the Southern Cone suggests that Blanes was an explorer in his own landscape who was interested in seeing and representing the margins of his Latin America.2

Marina del Sur difers from other seascapes he painted in that it lacks the reference to land that is present in other compositions.3 Other seascapes, such as En el Estrecho de Magallanes, provide us with visual landmarks and information about location.4 In En el Estrecho as was typical in his other landscapes—Blanes relates a narrative via the elements of the landscape, portraying a ship as it navigates the Strait against a mountainous coastline. The terrain allows us not only to interpret the landscape visually, but the rigidity of the mountains also demonstrates the artist’s sense of national pride and identity. By contrast, there are no descriptive land markers in Marina to identify its location. The singularity of this scene in Blanes’s oeuvre and the impeccably crafted composition with very tight details packaged in a small, challenging scale raise questions of attribution.5

Without the coastline visible in this work, the carefully depicted roughness of the water that envelops the ship in its waves is the only hint at location. The cropped scene allows the narrative of the ship overcome by the power of nature to become the focal point. The addition of the mast tossed in the unpredictable winds of the Strait is a nod to the sublime energy created by overwhelming and untamable nature. The palette also invokes a feeling of the sublime, as the dark ominous hues of the sea and the sky allude to the peril and uncertainty ahead for the ship. The looming dark clouds over the composition expand on the idea of the unknown, as both the sea and the sky work together to overwhelm the passing ship. Ofering the viewer no signs of civilization beyond the minute fgures on the ship itself, the scene conveys the danger of being submerged by these tumultuous waters at the end of the world.

The composition refects Blanes’s national identity and relationship to Latin America by placing him in the position of traveler artist in his own terrain. We are left with an impression of his country. We see his native landscape, represented in the strait, as untamable, much like his gauchos, while the European forces, personifed by the ship, are vulnerable to the overwhelming power of the landscape, which perhaps recalls the desire for independence from colonial Europe that Blanes so commonly invoked in his oeuvre.

1 Octavio C. Assunção, Alicia Haber, Katherine Manthorne, and Edward Sullivan, The Art of Juan Manuel Blanes (Buenos Aires and New York: Fundación Bunge y Born and Americas Society, 2002), 81–113.

2 Blanes traveled extensively, mostly between the Rio Plata region and Italy. He went to Italy in 1861 with a grant from the Uruguayan government to obtain formal academic training, staying for fve years. Ibid., 121–47.

3 In 1873 Blanes created a series of fve seascapes of the Strait of Magellan. Juan Zorilla de San Martin and Carlos A. Berro, Exposición Internacional de Chile (Santiago, Chile: 1876), 55–69.

4 Auction Result. Castells Montevideo. Lot 068. 1998.

5 While Blanes had some academic training by 1873, the composition seems very advanced. Typically he applied paint more thinly with the canvas often visible. Here the paint has been applied more thickly, especially in the lower register of the composition. The treatment of the sky, however, is characteristic of Blanes’s hand, as the brushstrokes become more painterly, and begins to thin, specifcally in the upper-right corner, making an argument for the work being coauthored by Chateaufort, whose signature is on the lower-left side of the composition.

Marina del Sur, 1873

alana hernandez

Juan Manuel Blanes (1830–1901), Uruguay

Marina del Sur, 1873

Oil on board, 27 × 23 cm (10 X × 9 inches)

Anton Siegel

Little is known about the artist Anton Siegel beyond the fact that he was active during the 1820s in Vienna, where he made a living by painting portraits of members of the city’s rising professional classes, veduta scenes such as View of the Port of Montevideo, and representations of local events.1 We do not know if Siegel had the opportunity to travel to Uruguay; whether, that is, he based this painting on frsthand observation, or on other European writers’ or artists’ representations of Montevideo and its environs. Although it was not as popular a destination for European travelers during the frst several decades of the nineteenth century as Mexico, Brazil, or the Andes, numerous scenes of the city, its inhabitants, and their customs were published in London as color etchings in Emeric Essex Vidal’s Picturesque Illustrations of Buenos Ayres and Monte Video in 1820.2 Regardless of whether or not Siegel traveled to Montevideo himself, he adopted the conventions of veduta painting to represent its port, and in doing so presented a remote South American city in the guise of an Italian scene enormously familiar to his European viewers.

Veduta—which means “view” in Italian—was a genre that became popular in Venice and Rome during the eighteenth century, when such scenes were widely produced as book illustrations, prints, and paintings. As a rubric for painting city views, veduta scenes, in many ways, complemented the coeval rise of landscape painting. View of the Port of Montevideo displays many traits of veduta scenes, including an elevated viewpoint, a registration of great detail, and a pervasive sense of light.3 Siegel has chosen a view of Montevideo from the north, looking south, directly onto the port. Beyond the water, we fnd commercial and governmental buildings hugging the coastline and rows of docked ships and smaller crafts foating in calm waters. Looking onto the scene from our elevated point of view allows us to see the carefully rendered masts, sails, and rope ladders of the ships, and the pediments, arched window frames, and cornices of the port’s neoclassical architecture. Several rowboats drifting in the water near the docks suggest that larger ships have dropped anchor out of view. Beyond the peninsula, bright white sails draw our eye back toward the mouth of the Rio Plata, while above the city’s low skyline, Montevideo’s characteristic hill, or el cerro, gently rises in the distance. As was also the practice in veduta painting, Siegel has fattened Montevideo’s architectural facades to make their details more visible, and has lent symmetry to his composition by balancing sky and water in equal measure. The even, moderate light that pervades the scene was a tool used by veduta paintings to

convey unity and calm. And, although Siegel’s view of Montevideo is dominated by a gray tone, it is not somber. Despite the grayness of the scene, the picture appears to emanate light.

Siegel represents Montevideo as an orderly, calm port city; neither bustling with commerce nor marked with any sign of its history of political confict. Indeed, if Siegel painted this view of Montevideo for a European audience during the 1820s, which it seems likely he did, Montevideo was at the time the continued focus of ongoing struggles related to the wars of independence that were occurring in the region. Uruguay, after annexation by Brazil in the wake of the revolution against Spain, did not win its independence until 1825, when Montevideo was proclaimed its capital. Although we cannot be sure what interest the city held for Siegel or his Viennese patrons, we do know that for the British artist Vidal, who visited the region just prior to Uruguay’s independence, Montevideo’s chief attraction was its strategic position as the most accessible harbor and point of entrance to the Rio Plata. For Siegel, however, Montevideo’s value was related, apparently, to the city’s resemblance to the southern European port cities typically represented in veduta scenes.

1 Franz Heinrich Böckh, Wiens lebende Schriftsteller, Künstler, und Dilettanten im Kunstfache: Dann Bücher-, Kunst- und Naturschätze und andere Seheswürdigkeiten dieser Haupt- und Residenz-Stadt: Ein Handbuch für Einheimische und Fremde (Vienna: B. P. Bauer, 1822); and Katalog des Historischen Museums der K. K. Hauptund Residenzstadt Wien (Vienna: Gemeinderath Wien, 1888).

2 Emeric Essex Vidal, Picturesque Illustrations of Buenos Ayres and Monte Video (London: R. Ackermann, 1820).

3 Emily Berns, The Origins of the Italian Veduta (Providence: Brown University, 1978).

View of the Port of Montevideo, n.d.

harper montgomery

Anton Siegel (1763–1846), Austria

View of the Port of Montevideo, n.d. Oil on canvas, 50.5 × 82 cm (19 Y × 32 N inches)

Fritz Georg Melbye

The restless Fritz Melbye spent most of his career traveling throughout the world. Born in Denmark in 1826 where he trained as a marine painter with his older brother Anton, Fritz left Denmark for Saint Thomas in 1849, never to return home. In his paintings, Fritz Melbye focused on two subjects: anecdotal urban landscapes, which demonstrate his interest in the people and customs he encountered on his travels, and paintings depicting bodies of water, especially seascapes. Melbye and his two artist brothers specialized in “transcribing exotic landscapes for Europeans.”1 Despite his wanderlust, Melbye managed to exhibit his work in Copenhagen on at least two occasions between 1849 and 1858, where the Danish king was a patron.2

Of Caracas, Venezuela takes its viewpoint from the water just of the coast of La Guaira, the port city of Caracas. A calm blue sky flled with wispy clouds provides a backdrop, and the clouds partially wreathe the two mountain peaks that lie between the port and the city. The peaks diminish in height and color intensity as they recede along the coast and fade into the background, creating a sense of deep atmospheric perspective. Melbye has juxtaposed pale lilac and bright cobalt on one peak, an example of his unusual style of modeling a soft shape through unexpected color combinations. His color choices diferentiate him from other traveler artists, and pointedly ignore the academic prescriptions of contemporary European painters.

The backdrop of sky and mountains conveys a calm, peaceful feeling. The sky refracts the sun’s brightness throughout the entire scene, exemplifying Melbye’s “magnifcent luminosity.”3 The water, in contrast, roils up, choppy and full of movement, providing an obvious challenge to the boats trying to make their way through it. Melbye has created the sense of the water’s energetic movements by painting white foam faring away from a side-wheel paddle steamer’s prow, and white troughs between the sharply diferentiated light and dark blue-greens of the waves. We can also make out four or fve sailing vessels of various styles and sizes running against a stif breeze, the two in the foreground leaning sharply to the right. The steamer, though fully equipped with a set of furled sails, needs to use its engine to make headway out of the harbor against the powerful breeze. One high, unfurled jib stabilizes the ship against the current. Three men competently manage a small wooden punt in the right foreground, where the water seems calmer. Melbye has shown us in one painting the advances from human- to wind- to steam-powered marine technology. It is remarkable that the water teems with people and boats, while there are many fewer signs of

Off Caracas, Venezuela, 1853

human presence on land. The only clearly visible fgures are the three Caribbean men skillfully handling the punt, possibly an expression of Melbye’s alertness to the local inhabitants.

Until recently, Melbye has been best known for his infuence on Camille Pissarro, whom he met on Saint Thomas in 1851.4 Recognizing Pissarro’s talent, he encouraged him to move beyond black-and-white harbor sketches to oil colors. Many believe Melbye’s encouragement of Pissarro’s use of color was infuential in his later development as an Impressionist after he returned to France in 1855. The two artists spent the years 1853 and 1854 together in La Guaira and Caracas. Although we know Melbye visited Paris in 1856, between this time and the early 1860s his whereabouts are unknown; he may have spent much of that time in Venezuela. He moved to New York in the early 1860s, where he met Frederic Church. The two artists became close, and Melbye accompanied Church to Jamaica on a painting expedition from June to October of 1865. While still in the United States, Melbye exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art (1861–63), showing paintings that gave evidence of his travels to the North Cape (Norway), Newfoundland, Gibraltar, Cuba, and Santo Domingo.5 By the late 1860s the peripatetic Melbye found himself in China, where he died in Shanghai, in 1869.

Of Caracas, Venezuela provides a fne example of Melbye’s fascination with painting the sea and is a refection of his passion for travel, particularly by ocean.

1 Richard Brettell and Karen Zukowski, Camille Pissarro in the Caribbean, 1850–1855: Drawings from the Collection at Olana, exh. cat. (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1997), 12.

2 Michael N. Benisovich and James Dallett, “Camille Pissarro and Fritz Melbye in Venezuela,” Apollo 84 (July 1966): 44.

3 Alfredo Boulton, “Pissarro in Venezuela,” Introduction to Pissarro in Venezuela, exh. cat. (New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1968), 14. Introduction taken from Alfredo Boulton, Pissarro en Venezuela (Caracas: Editorial Arte, 1966).

4 In personal correspondence, Louise Højmark Falden, assistant curator at the Ordrupgaard Museum in Charlottenlund, Denmark, reports that research is being done on Melbye in the course of preparing an exhibition on the potential link between Danish Golden Age Painting and French Impressionism for February 27–May 31, 2015.

5 Annette Stabell, “Fritz Melbye, Biography,” in Weilbachs Kunstnerleksikon (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1994).

ellen glass birger

Fritz Georg Melbye (1826–1869), Denmark

Of Caracas, Venezuela, 1853

Oil on canvas, 52.1 × 71.7 cm (20 K × 28 N inches)

Anton Goering

Anton Goering, like his fellow German countryman Ferdinand Bellermann, produced an abundant and varied repertoire of Venezuelan landscape paintings, and likewise registered local characters and customs. Coming from a scientifc background (as a zoologist, ornithologist, taxidermist, and botanist), Goering arrived in Venezuela in 1866, having previously visited other countries in the region. Between 1856 and 1858 he traveled across parts of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay as part of a scientifc expedition organized by the Zoological Society of The Hague. When he returned to Germany, Goering continued his natural history studies and, from 1860 to 1863, took courses in painting and modeling at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts. He would later expand his artistic knowledge at the school of Joseph Wolf, a wellknown German illustrator of natural history who was then residing in London. He thus formed a well-balanced relationship between his scientifc interests and his artistic talents, which immediately began to bear interesting fruit.

In September of 1866 Goering left for Venezuela under the auspices of the London Zoological Society, intending to acquire specimens for the British Museum and other European institutions. He remained in Venezuela through 1874, passing through nearly all of Venezuela’s territory with the exception of the Orinoco River region, gathering animal specimens, preserving birds, and producing numerous colorful watercolors and drawings of the local landscape. Nearly ffty of his Venezuelan watercolors and drawings were exhibited in Caracas when the English speleologist James Mudie Spence, on a mission of ofcial business for the British government, organized an exhibition of works by local and foreign artists with the title of the First Exhibition of Venezuelan Fine Art, later known as the “Café del Ávila” exhibition. Like his compatriot Alexander von Humboldt, Goering explored Guácharo Cave, as well as other nearby caves in the same geological system, located to the southwest of the town of Caripe; one of these caves, discovered by Goering, is named after him.1

Upon his return to Germany, the scientist and artist continued painting watercolors of Venezuela’s tropical landscapes for many years, referring to notes taken on site and above all to his own memory. Many of these attractive images were compiled by Goering in a book titled Von tropische Tiefande zum ewigen Schnee (From the Tropical Lowlands to the Eternal Snowfall),2 published in Leipzig in 1893. This edition consists of twelve chromolithographs of images from throughout Venezuela, along with forty text illustrations and a text written by

Goering himself about his experiences during his eight-year sojourn in Venezuela.

Puerto Cabello was one of the paintings reproduced in the book. In this delicate watercolor, Goering depicts a view of the town of Puerto Cabello, site of Venezuela’s second most important commercial port on the Caribbean Sea. This small city is set between the sea and the mountains of the coastal range, which forms the wall of dense tropical vegetation in the background. The observer is located before the city ’s center, along the roadways of the port, their view slightly above the horizon and at a considerable distance from the city, so that the buildings appear distant and undefned. Goering frequently employed this aerial perspective in his landscapes in order to achieve a distanced efect. Nevertheless, to the right we can identify San Felipe or Libertador Castle; then the Cathedral of San José, with its tall tower; and the customs building in the center.

It would seem that the artist was more interested in faithfully recording that which was closest to him than in ofering us a panoramic view of the distant city. Goering depicts this marshy zone with painstaking detail, including a group of the region’s characteristic sea birds, the Caribbean brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis occidentalis) above the rocks to the right, and a shrub typical of this region, the mangrove (Rhizophora mangle), whose intertwining branches and roots cover the islets scattered throughout the sea, forming small forests known in Venezuela as manglares.

A symphony of cold, transparent blues and greens of varying intensity and tonality is interrupted only by the ochres of the earth that occupy the foreground, and in the distance, by the tiny reddish accents that show the roofs of the far-of city’s most important buildings.

rafael romero d.

1 See the work by Ferdinand Bellermann, Guácharo Cave, on pages 214–15 in this catalogue The watercolor by Anton Goering that is reproduced on page 213 is a representation of one of these caves, known as “Cueva Clara.”

2 In 1962, the University of the Andes in Mérida published a Spanish-language version of this profusely illustrated book, with the title Venezuela: The Most Beautiful Tropical Country. In 1994, the university republished the book with the same title and a new translation of the text. In 1969 the Humboldt Association of Caracas published the trilingual (Spanish, English, and German) Venezuela a Century Ago: The Paintings of Anton Goering, 1826–1905, which also contains beautiful illustrations of Goering’s Venezuelan works along with a biographical text by Walter Dupuoy. (I am grateful to the J. I. Parra Library, Caracas, for allowing me to consult their bibliography on Goering.)

View of Puerto Cabello, c. 1897

Anton Goering (1836–1905), Germany

View of Puerto Cabello, c. 1897

Watercolor on paper, 36.5 × 61.6 cm (14 W × 24 N inches)

Charles de Wolf Brownell Artist unidentified

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, Charles de Wolf Brownell practiced law for ten years before abandoning it due to illness and his perception that his profession was falling prey to rampant dishonesty. His transition to artist was not as abrupt as the disparity of the two professions suggests, as his mother and brothers were amateur artists and often included comical drawings in their correspondence.1 Brownell’s concerns for the morality of his new career was as much a result of his religious upbringing as it was a refection of reading John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843) which proclaimed that the artist’s role was to fnd “truth in nature.”

Brownell’s earliest training in Hartford was with the landscape artist and portraitist Henry Bryant who encouraged the young man to paint the beauty of the Connecticut River Valley. Further instruction was found in the studios of Theodore Busch and Joseph Ropes, both topographical artists. These early experiences encouraged him to seek out the work of ardent traveler artists including George Catlin, Captain John Smith, and Alexander von Humboldt. This eventually led to his own publication, The Indian Races of North and South America (1853). Brownell had yet to travel west or south so he used these highly regarded predecessors as references for that which he had yet to see in the fesh. Writing of the West Indies’, “kindly and simply-hearted race,” he focused much attention on Cuba.2 This fascination with documentation seeped into his art, which began to take on an autobiographical dimension, documenting the everyday beauty of his hometown, but also one of fantasy, as he drafted a map of this island he had yet to visit.3

Brownell began the frst of seven consecutive winters in Cuba in 1856, staying in and around the sugar plantations owned by his mother’s family. Arriving in Havana by way of steamer, Brownell settled in Matanzas, thirty miles east of the city. Fresh from his training with Busch and Ropes he initially found work painting formal plantation portraits of sites owned by the de Wolf family and associates. Thus they are sanitized of the grueling realities of the sugar trade, which was notorious for its maltreatment of slave labor. This previously undocumented and rare city view by the artist, Havana Bay, was created during his frst few visits to the island. Given its state of fnish, it is surely a studio work completed upon his return to Connecticut and based on sketches made on site. It is the only known city view by the artist and signifcant not only for its beauty but also because it bridges his early topographical work to his later atmospheric landscapes. Oriented toward Morro Castle, Havana sweeps in a crescent along the

Havana Bay, c. 1856–66

View of Havana, n.d.

right side of the canvas. Brownell takes an unusual perspective, preferring a more eighteenth-century depiction in which a bucolic rural scene extends toward the industrial. The bay is depicted in late afternoon as the sun begins its descent in the west and a strong warm glow is cast across the scene: soft yellow-green foliage, warm peach soil, and a glittering white wash across the city structures. Ignoring the extraordinary trade of Havana port, he chose to depict it as calm with just a few passing leisure boats. On the left, two fgures walk along a path with their dog. Each is dressed in the brightly colored clothing of landowners or managers of sugar plantations, situated behind and to the left of the viewer. Labor and trade have been removed from the scene in favor of the picturesque. Brownell’s brushstroke is soft and gives an impression rather than the topographically fne detail one would expect from a traditional city view. By 1857 Brownell was deeply embedded in the rural regions far removed from Havana, and had not yet seen the fnely detailed work of Frederic Church in 1860. Thus this painting was likely completed 1857–58.

Contemporaneous views of Havana tended toward the topographically descriptive birds-eye view, as seen in View of Havana. This vista, from the blufs of Castillo de Cabana, afords more precise detail of the emerging cosmopolitan city and industry in its bustling port. Two fgures take in the spectacle from across the bay: one man dressed in a fne suit and wearing a top hat, with another in blue, carrying a sword beside him. While a class distinction is indicated by who is standing and who is seated, there is a democracy of organic and inorganic splendor as both marvel at the scene in contemplation of nature’s grandeur.

alison petretti

1 Brownell Family Papers, William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan.

2 Charles de Wolf Brownell, The Indian Races of North and South America: Comprising an Account of the Principal Aboriginal Races; a Description of Their National Customs, Mythology, and Religious Ceremonies; the History of Their Most Powerful Tribes, and of Their Most Celebrated Chiefs and Warriors; Their Intercourse and War with the European Settlers; and a Great Variety of Anecdote and Description (Hartford, CT: Lucius Stebbins, 1853), 487.

3 This diary is described in Ita G. Krebs, Charles De Wolf Brownell (1822–1909), Explorer of the American Landscape (New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1991). However, the diary has since been broken up and sold piecemeal.

Charles de Wolf Brownell (1822–1909), United States Havana Bay, c. 1856–66

Oil on canvas, 21 × 33.3 cm (8 N × 13 V inches)

unidentifed

Artist

View of Havana, n.d.

Oil on canvas, 67.3 × 83.8 cm (26 K × 33 inches)

Charles Chatworthy Wood Taylor

In 1834, the English-born artist Charles Chatworthy Wood Taylor, often known as Carlos Wood, completed this watercolor of Cumberland Bay on the Robinson Crusoe Island of the Juan Fernández archipelago, located 360 miles from the coast of Valparaíso, Chile.1 Primarily a watercolorist of landscapes and seascapes, Wood frequently depicted naval actions in South American port cities. The dramatic landscape, harbor scene, and maritime subject of Town of Juan Fernández, Cumberland Bay typifes Wood’s artistic output during his time in South America.2

Wood explored his artistic promise from a young age, encouraged by his parents. Although there was no art school in his hometown of Burslem, Wood studied with pottery masters working in the largest pottery factory in England. While he studied drawing, painting, and ceramics in Burslem, Wood also read travel books that sparked a desire for travel. He departed for the Mediterranean for a yearlong voyage in 1811, at age eighteen, and later set sail for Boston in 1817. Wood worked as a landscape painter in Boston, and was eventually hired by the American government to create drawings and watercolors during a scientifc voyage to South America on the USS Macedonia.

Wood arrived in Valparaíso, Chile, in January 1819, the year following Chilean independence from Spain. In 1820, the artist joined the army that sailed from Chile aboard the San Martín to assist in the liberation of Peru. José de San Martín, the Argentine general and “Protector of Peru,” soon commissioned Wood to paint an image of the Huaura River, located in the region north of Peru’s capital city of Lima. Wood was also awarded a large monetary prize ($2,500) for his design of a “Liberty” statue, which was never completed. In addition to these commissions, Wood completed numerous maritime paintings, some of which hung in the salon of the frigate Macedonia or otherwise were intended for South American audiences. Remaining involved in military matters, the artist was selected as the Chilean Military Engineer in 1824, fought in the Chilean Civil War of 1829, and designed the new Chilean coat of arms in 1834. Wood’s frequent commissions as well as his appointment as art instructor at Valparaíso’s newly founded National Institute in 1830 signaled the traveling artist’s success as a landscape and marine scene painter in South America.

In Wood’s watercolor, the craggy clifs that tower above the bay are veiled in a thin fog, casting the mountain peaks in shadow while leaving the safe harbor illuminated. Undoubtedly composed from aboard ship, this image depicts other vessels in Cumberland Bay. A British military

Town of Juan Fernández, Cumberland Bay (Juan Fernández Island), 1834

ship enters the scene at left, indicating the presence of the British navy and traders in the years following Chilean independence. The ship fies the fag of the British Royal Navy at its bow, and the English national fag with Saint George’s Cross at its mast. On shore, the Chilean fag fies atop a fortress-like structure. The juxtaposition of national emblems in the bay of this port city alludes to the cooperation between Britain and Chile during the Chilean independence movement, and their continued friendly relations.

Between 1704 and 1709, the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk was marooned on uninhabited Robinson Crusoe Island where he learned to live of the land’s resources until his rescue by an English ship, the Duke. Named for the famous literary character, Robinson Crusoe Island has at times been considered the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s novel, which was frst published in 1719. Defoe recounts a fctional story of an English sailor who, when stranded on an island of the coast of Trinidad, survives by domesticating the island’s resources.

Used by Britain and the United States during the fur trade in the early nineteenth century, the Juan Fernández archipelago was a rich source of fur seal pelts, which were exported to Guangzhou (formerly Canton), China. Additionally, sandalwood was harvested from the fertile area surrounding Cumberland Bay until it was entirely extracted from the island. In his watercolor, Wood delineated a dirt path that climbs the steep clifs, alluding to the penetration by traders into the island to exploit its resources.

By the 1830s, when Wood completed this image, Robinson Crusoe Island was the site of a small community of soldiers who had been exiled during revolts on the Chilean mainland. The Chilean government had founded a penal colony on the island in 1750, which was poorly maintained due to the cost of shipping supplies over 300 miles from Valparaíso. In the 1830s, the dilapidated colony at Cumberland Bay consisted of small dwellings—huts and houses—and forlorn exsoldiers. By the following decade, the island became a stopover port for whaling and other ships.3

caroline gillaspie

1 For extended biographical information on Wood, see Luis Álvarez Urquieta, El Artista Pintor Carlos Chatworthy Wood Taylor, Prócer de la Independencia Sudamericana (Santiago, Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1936); and William Edmundson, A History of the British Presence in Chile: From Bloody Mary to Charles Darwin and the Decline of British Infuence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

2 This watercolor is most likely mistitled, as the city on the Cumberland Bay is actually San Juan Bautista.

3 Alexander G. Findlay, A Directory for the Navigation of the South Pacifc Ocean: with Descriptions of its Coasts, Islands, etc., from the Strait of Magalhaens to Panama, and Those of New Zealand, Australia, etc., Its Winds, Currents, and Passages (London: Richard Holmes Laurie, 1871), 424. According to John McCulloch, one instance of the rental of the islands was in the 1840s when an American entrepreneur wanted to transport Tahitian families to the island to cultivate the land and improve the port in Cumberland Bay to create a stopover for whaling and other ships. See John Ramsay McCulloch, A Dictionary, Geographical, Statistical, and Historical of the Various Countries, Places and Principal Natural Objects in the World, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1842), 92.

Charles Chatworthy Wood Taylor (1792–1856), United Kingdom Town of Juan Fernández, Cumberland Bay (Juan Fernández Island), 1834 Watercolor on paper, 30.4 × 49.9 cm (12 × 19 X inches)

Ernest Charton de Treville

In rendering the port of Guayaquil, dominated by a smooth expanse of water in the foreground, Ernest Charton de Treville asserts himself within the lineage of French painting dominated by Claude Lorrain and Joseph Vernet. Subsequently, modern rivers, ports, and seascapes would be mobilized by the avant-garde artists of the generation following Charton, who sought Baudelaire’s conception of modernity through the tenuous balance of the eternal sea and the feeting modern activities of the tourists and visitors to the beach. Unlike his compatriots who mainly stayed in France, Charton defned his career by his adventurous itinerary, depicting Mexico, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and Argentina throughout his life. A distant landscape in fux, Guayaquil unites this two-pronged interest in the sea: it is both the locus of the eternal and the agent of change.

Though little account survives of his life in France, Charton arrived in South America in 1843, settling frst in Valparaíso, Chile, before moving to Santiago in 1848. An attempt to sail to California in 1849, thwarted by pirates, landed Charton in Guayaquil the same year.1 Here he painted two scenes of this small tributary of the Guayas River looking toward the Pacifc Ocean. Many European traveler artists depicted foreign lands infused with the picturesque strategies of irregular views in which the ravages of time and nature in the foreground lead to a distant horizon. One can see these at play in this scene: the foreground is enshrouded in overgrown vegetation, yet the painting itself is given over to the bright sky. Additionally, this movement from the foreground to the background is defned as much by the contrasts of light and dark as the movement within time and space: a primordial scene of bathing women and simple boatmen framed by primitive huts and shaded by a tree ushers the viewer into the scene. In the middle ground, beyond the two huts on the right that are elevated by rustic pilotis, a more modern boatman navigates his vessel underneath a bridge toward the gulf of Guayaquil. The buildings in the foreground recall those painted in seventeenth-century Brazil by Frans Post. The lion’s share of Post’s output was given to Louis XIV in 1679; the frst views of South America were seen by Dutch eyes and consumed by an exalted French audience. Some Netherlandish motifs therefore determine Charton’s view: the darkened foreground of water and humble vernacular buildings, an attention to bridges and infrastructure, and at least half of the canvas given over to the sky.

By the nineteenth century, circumstances markedly altered. Guayaquil, ruled by Spain since 1538, after weathering attacks and looting

, 1849

from English and French pirates for two centuries, declared independence in 1822. Ports were now open to global trade, the signs of which are evident in Charton’s view. In the center, anchored by a formal porch, a substantial building faces the bay, ofering a pier to the boats. This structure faces the commercial port of the river, the wheelhouse of income and development for this coastal town. A customshouse foats on the horizon, embodying international commerce and government revenue.

Charton has leveraged the arcadian simplicity of the foreground with the modern international commerce in the distance. On the left, the dark bristling form of a tree frames one side of the painting, recalling the Dutch-inspired fora of Theodore Rousseau. While Rousseau’s generation looked to their native landscape with unfinching vigor and curiosity, ennobling the environs of Fontainebleau, here, this familiar motif is juxtaposed with a palm tree, an exotic emblem of temperate zones. The crooked form of the palm leaning into the river, the modern lantern on the bridge, and the white sail on the other side of it summarize this thematic movement in shorthand: tropical nature, infrastructure, and maritime trade. Perhaps, with this great expanse of water leading to the Pacifc Ocean alluded to in the foreground, there is also an element of the Burkean sublime with its awe-inspiring danger represented by the ocean. Seen in this light, the irregularly bending form of the palm evokes a nostalgic impulse, an idea that will be taken up and expanded upon by American painters.

Guayaquil is thus a bold step forward in French landscape painting and depictions of South America in the nineteenth century. Charton painted the region when landscape painting was being reconsidered in Europe, evolving from a descriptive account of topography to the site of subjectivity and painterly innovation. Landscape was no longer a timeless record of an unchanged world, but the very locus of radical change. The nineteenth-century landscape was a marker of this fux. Few French painters explored the territory covered by Charton, and even fewer depicted these changes as he did.

theodore

barrow

1 Jill Fitzell, “Cultural Colonialism and Ethnography: European Travellers in Nineteenth Century Ecuador.” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 1994), 383. “Charton, Ernest . . . Duration in Ecuador: 1848 (in Guayaquil after ship was pirated) until unknown date, and again in March 1862.”

Guayaquil

Ernest Charton de Treville (1815–1877), France

Guayaquil, 1849

Oil on canvas, 40 × 59.1 cm (15 O × 23 N inches)

Thomas Ender

Thomas Ender traveled to Brazil just once when he was twenty-four, and stayed for less than a year due to ill health and his inability to acclimatize to the tropical climate. While there, however, he produced hundreds of watercolors and sketches to document the journey and the country for his patron, Prince Metternich of Vienna. Most of the works depict scenes in and around Rio de Janeiro, where Ender arrived on the frigate Austria with the frst Austrian scientifc expedition to South America in 1817.

This watercolor shows a view of the neighborhood of Engenho Velho (Old Mill), with Rio’s iconic Sugarloaf Mountain in the misty background. Four male fgures are shown in the foreground tending land that belonged to the Jesuit Order of Brazil before they were expelled from the Portuguese Empire in the mid-eighteenth century. A woman carrying a basket wanders down the path along the edge of a sugar cane feld toward a rustic cottage on the mountainside. Ender presents the AfroBrazilian body with a neutrality that suggests he was unconcerned with the reality of the social conditions surrounding slavery.1 While many of Ender’s contemporaries, such as Jean-Baptiste Debret, traveled to Brazil to make images that expressed their support for antislavery campaigns, in this watercolor and others Ender fails to demonstrate political concern for the Afro-Brazilians he was observing at work.

The expedition, which included famed scientists such as zoologist Johann Baptist von Spix and botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, was devised to accompany the archduchess Leopoldina as she crossed the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro to marry Dom Pedro, the crown prince of Portugal and future emperor of Brazil. Maria Leopoldina of Austria, the daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, was an avid student of natural history, and the expedition to her new home was the largest and most important Austrian scientifc mission to date.2 Ender’s involvement with the Austrian expedition to Brazil stemmed from his contact with Alexander von Humboldt and the patronage of Prince Metternich. In a time of democratic impulses towards colonial independence and a growing global abolitionist movement, Metternich was a staunch conservative whose political persuasions countered many of the liberal ideals of new democracies. The political neutrality of the works Ender produced under Metternich’s patronage may have been Ender’s attempt to balance the conservatism of his patron with his own experiences in Brazil.3

Rio de Janeiro: View of the Neighborhood of Engenho Velho Drawn from the Austrian Embassy is extremely small in scale, measuring just

Rio de Janeiro: View of the Neighborhood of Engenho Velho Drawn from the Austrian Embassy, 1817–18

over 5 by 8 inches. However, with Ender’s artistic skill and attention to detail, he was able to include an enormous amount of information within the small area of the work. Ender’s ability to capture the topographic, geologic, and botanic specifcity of the land that was of such political interest to the Austrian Empire suggests that Metternich selected Ender as the artist to accompany the expedition because of his talent for accuracy. The political neutrality of the Brazilian sketches within the growing global abolition movements attest to his role in the diplomatic and political underpinnings of his patron’s conservatism. Ender depicted the fve fgures at a distance, without any attempt to bestow them with individualizing features. The work they are engaged in is not arduous, but an idealized and romanticized representation of labor. While three of the men are digging in the ground, a fourth looks into the vegetation. The woman in the background does not engage with the laborers at all, and almost blends into the felds behind her. The fgures are identifed as members of the subaltern classes not only by their dark skin—and, in the case of three of the men, their near nudity—but also by their disconnection from the urban life of Rio de Janeiro, relegated as they are to the outskirts of the city to work the land.

The young Ender had to negotiate between the Austrian Foreign Minister’s conservative politics, the scientifc impetus for the expedition, and his own artistic agency. This work is an example of Ender’s political ambivalence in reconciling the various elements at odds with his creative impulse. While this ambivalence reads as problematic within his body of work, it also ensured lasting patronage for the artist. Ender was the sole artist on the expedition, which was both inspired by the wave of Humboldtian fervor then gripping Europe and Austria’s political desire to stake its claim in South America.

agnieszka anna ficek

1 Andrea C. Valente, “Black Slaves in Farbe: Representations of the Subaltern in Thomas Ender’s Landscape Painting from Old Rio,” Austrian Studies 20 (2012): 25.

2 Gilberto Ferrez, O Brasil de Thomas Ender, 1817 (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação João Moreira Salles, 1976), 9.

3 Andrea C. Valente, “Black Slaves in Farbe”: 42.

Thomas Ender (1793–1875), Austria

Rio de Janeiro: View of the Neighborhood of Engenho Velho Drawn from the Austrian Embassy, 1817–18

Watercolor on paper, 14.4 × 20.9 cm (5 AA⁄af × 8 N inches)

Artist unidentified

This nineteenth-century watercolor by an unidentifed artist illustrates a fourishing coastal city with a narrow peninsula framing a distant harbor. The viewer’s elevated vantage point is shared by four fgures in the foreground, identifable as residents of Lima, Peru, by their traditional dress. Although this image lacks any inscription identifying the precise location of the view, its topography most likely depicts the port of Callao, located just north of Peru’s capital city of Lima.

After Peruvian independence, Callao steadily grew to become the largest port in the country. Along with Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Valparaíso, Chile, Callao became one of the most important stopping points for ships rounding Cape Horn. This included ships headed for the California Gold Rush after 1848, carrying passengers who sought a respite in Callao from the confnements of their ships.1 The city was also the main port for the guano trade by the 1840s, and a signifcant destination for Chinese laborers who harvested guano or worked on plantations near Callao.2

As the port of Callao developed from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century, building on the peninsula expanded. The increase in development in Callao coincided with the construction of the Fortaleza del Real Felipe, beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century and completed in 1811. The fortress is potentially identifable in the distance at the narrowest part of the peninsula.

The distinct peninsula that juts into the Pacifc Ocean and defnes the topography of Callao difers signifcantly from the protective bay of Valparaíso, or the large delta of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Eighteenthcentury engravings of this location suggest hills at the westernmost tip of the peninsula, as well as guano islands that dot the coastline. These landscape features appear in this watercolor framed by billowing clouds at left, reminiscent of the thick fog that covers the coast around Lima for half of the year.

The artist appears to have taken liberties with the construction of Callao’s topography in this watercolor, shifting the islands of the coast as well as the architecture a bit farther south than contemporaneous prints indicate. Despite these changes in the composition, the artist demonstrated great interest in detailing the architecture of the city, recording the orderly rows of colonial-style buildings arranged along the curved coastline. Piers and numerous ships dot the harbor near the distant peninsula.

Similar to contemporaneous images of port scenes, this watercolor features members of the local population in the foreground. Potentially

Lima and the Port of Callao, n.d.

created for viewers in Europe or the United States, this scene becomes distinctly Latin American with the inclusion of this fgural group wearing typical costumes of Limeños, such as the tapada that gracefully veils the standing female fgure’s face. Frequently, traveling artists such as Ernest Charton and Johann Moritz Rugendas produced costumbrista or other ethnographic studies in South America for European viewers, and included cross sections of the diverse populations in their landscapes or cityscapes. This watercolor is reminiscent of harbor scenes by these and other artists that balance picturesque embellishments with empirical observation of the landscape to produce a view that is both instructive and fascinating for foreign viewers.

caroline gillaspie

1 Bradley Jay Cartwright, Pacifc Passages: American Encounters with the Pacifc and Its People, 1815–1855 (Boulder: University of Colorado, 2006), 310.

2 Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolies in Peru, 1849–1874 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970).

unidentifed

Artist

Lima and the Port of Callao, n.d.

Watercolor on paper, 22.8 × 43.2 cm (9 × 17 inches)

Joseph Brüggemann

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the location of Santa Catarina was the subject of one of the most beautiful descriptions of the Brazilian coast. The author of this description was the RussianGerman naturalist Georg Heinrich von Langsdorf, who, as a member of the Russian voyage of circumnavigation commanded by Adam Johann von Krusenstern from 1803 to 1807, was confronted for the frst time with the tropical climate of South America.

“The fowers, of numerous colors, sizes, shapes and confgurations,” Langsdorf writes of his arrival in Santa Catarina during that journey, “exhaled a combination of perfumes into the atmosphere, which fortifed the body and brightened the spirit with each inhalation. Large butterfies I had only seen before as rarity in our European cabinets of curiosities futtered around spectacular plants full of fowers, that grow diminished in our greenhouses and here fourish in exuberance. The hummingbirds of sparkling golden tones wooed the fowers of clusters of bananas loaded with honey, and the singing of birds I had never heard before reverberated in valleys with copious streams, delighting the heart and the ear. . . . Everything I saw around me flled me with admiration for its novelty, and awoke a sensitive impression that can not be described.”1

This passage ofers a description of the landscape that summarizes in archetypical terms the impression tropical America awoke in European travelers. It is possible that the German painter Joseph Brüggemann had read this publication and, although his visit to Santa Catarina was more than sixty years removed from Langsdorf’s, the landscape he found would still have had much of the charm evoked by the words of the traveling scientist. However, the emphasis of his paintings doesn’t respond to the look of a naturalist, but aims to show, above all, the changes in the occupation of space.

Brüggemann had arrived in Brazil around 1851, and his frst task on American soil was to make visual records of German colonization in Blumenau, in the hinterland to the northwest of the island of Santa Catarina. From the time of that work, Brüggemann made meticulous representations of space, always aiming to use a strictly descriptive procedure. In fact, this is the language he used to approach the representation of the old city of Desterro on the island of Santa Catarina.

Between 1866 and 1868 he painted various versions of this view, always from diferent places of observation. From a hill, he looks across the bay to the city, located on the island, and the view expands to the mountains on the mainland, showing their silhouettes in the back-

ground of the image. In the foreground the painter strives to describe the vegetation in all its diversity, using a fne brush that allows him to diferentiate the species of fora, and includes a lone fgure of a black man. In the mid-ground the same descriptive, conscientious drawing is to be seen, representing both the numerous ships anchored in the bay, as well as the modest and slightly monotonous constructions of the city.

The composition of this painting is simple. There is a homogenous light that illuminates all motifs in view with the same emphasis, so none is highlighted nor participates in the spatial construction of the composition. Furthermore, the only element that reveals a sensitive perception of the place is suggested by the violet tones of twilight in the sky that take up the upper third of the image.

After producing these paintings, Brüggemann pursued his artistic career in the city of Porto Alegre, also in southern Brazil. From 1868 onward he made a name there as a lithographer, and in 1881 several of his works, dated 1872, were exhibited there, with portraits and views of that city in Rio Grande do Sul.2 pablo

1 G. H. von Langsdorf, Bemerkungen auf einer Reise um die Welt in den Jahren 1803 bis 1807, 2 volumes (Frankfurt: Im Verlag bey Friedrich Eilmans, 1812) I, 29.

2 For a brief, well-illustrated summary of the life and work of Joseph Brüggemann, see Maria Elizabete Santos Peixoto, Pintores alemães no Brasil durante o século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Edições Pinakotheke, 1989), 109–19.

View of the Old Town of Desterro, Santa Catarina, Brazil, 1866

Joseph Brüggemann (1825–1894), Germany

View of the Old Town of Desterro, Santa Catarina, Brazil, 1866 Oil on canvas, 78.7 × 109.2 cm (31 × 43 inches)

THE ANDES

The Andes are a mountain system in western South America extending more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km) along the Pacifc Coast from Venezuela to Tierra del Fuego. Nineteenth-century eyes were focused especially on the Andes of Ecuador, made famous by a series of distinguished visitors. In “Mi delirio sobre el Chimborazo,” written in 1822, Simón Bolívar expressed his awe while standing on the volcano, “Un delirio febril embarga mi mente; me siento como encendido por un fuego extraño y superior” (“A febrile ecstasy invades my mind, I feel lit by a strange, higher fre.”). Chimborazo, the volcano that inspired such ardor, is the quintessential symbol of the Andes. The most elevated peak along the world’s longest mountain range, it was thought to be the highest mountain in the world at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Early travelers to South America were entranced by the verticality of their surroundings, and at 20,564 feet, Chimborazo, sited majestically in Ecuador’s Valley of the Volcanoes with many other massive peaks, did not disappoint.

Since few foreign explorers were allowed into the interior of the viceroyalties, expeditions to the Spanish colonies typically skirted the coast during the eighteenth century. An extensive expedition that was able to prevail over Spanish bureaucracy was that of the French Geodesic Mission led by Charles Marie de la Condamine, who was in South America from 1736 to 1744. The mission’s purpose was to measure the arcs of the earth’s curvature on the equator. Antonio Ulloa, who with his brother Jorge Juan were artists employed by the expedition, published an account of their travels in 1772. He described South America as a land of abundance and riches, marveling at its tremendous heights. While they were there in 1743 and 1744 the Cotopaxi volcano erupted twice.

The next foreigners who were permitted to travel to the interior of the colonies were Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, who arrived in 1799. On June 23, 1802, with no fanfare, the two explorers and their Ecuadorian friend, Carlos Montúfar, attempted an ascent of Chimborazo. They were forced to turn back just short of the summit, but their climb was considered a world mountaineering record. Humboldt conveyed their celebrated act as a conquest of nature, with forid descriptions of what he considered to be the most dramatic landscapes in the world, accompanied by striking illustrations that emphasized the picturesque through a joining of art and science. His account was made available to a wide audience, many of whom were artists who responded by traveling to those unknown lands to experience the spectacle themselves. The most renowned of these artists

was Frederic Church, who in 1853 and 1857 traveled to South America to paint the volcanoes.

Although modern photography permits sweeping images of a mountain range, this was not an option at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and many renditions of the Andes featured just one mountain. Humboldt’s dramatic reaction to the volcanoes, speaking of a vista where “one can observe all at once, and in frightening proximity, the colossal volcano of Cotopaxi, the slender peaks of Iliniza, and the Nevada de Quilindaña, . . . one of the most majestic and impressive sites that I have seen in either hemisphere,” gives a sense of their commanding presence.1 In the only illustrated volume of landscapes he produced, Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, 1810, the images of volcanoes are mostly single mountains. Nonetheless, they are striking, especially the centerfold colored engraving of Chimborazo. Humboldt published this revolutionary folio edition at a time when the engraving process had been refned to the point that the accompanying images in the style of a European heroic landscape were pristinely realized.

Not feeling the need to limit his images to single mountains, Church created panoramic scenes of both erupting and peaceful volcanoes that were sensations during the second half of the nineteenth century. He was not reluctant to rearrange the position of a mountain in order to incorporate a more sweeping composition into his canvases. His deliberately composed landscapes introduced a new generation of artists to the power of nature and the Andes. It is ironic that in 1859, the year Humboldt died and Church’s iconic painting Heart of the Andes was frst exhibited, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. Darwin’s theory of natural evolution eclipsed the Humboldtian concept of “unity in nature,” initiating a change in the character of landscape painting.2

georgia de havenon

1 Alexander von Humboldt, Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: A Critical Edition (1810), ed. Vera Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette, trans. J. Ryan Poynter (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012), 66.

2 See Stephen Jay Gould, “Church, Humboldt, and Darwin: The Tension and Harmony of Art and Science,” in Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 94–107.

Ferdinand Bellermann

In 1842, the twenty-eight-year-old artist Ferdinand Bellermann set out for Venezuela with the merchant ship Margareth. Although fortythree years had passed since Alexander von Humboldt had traveled to Venezuela, the journey of the older scientist and naturalist continued to loom large in the consciousness of German artists due to the infuential books he published upon his return. The illustrations of the Latin American landscape that appeared in Humboldt’s books served as a model for depicting the region for future artists, including Bellermann. Art historian Pablo Diener argues that Humboldt and his followers used nineteenth-century European conventions of the picturesque as a way to assimilate the unfamiliar elements of the Latin American landscape into compositions that followed established European aesthetics.1 Urao Lagoon supports Diener’s claim, showing how Humboldt inspired Bellermann to create works that faithfully depicted local characteristics of the landscape but organized them according to European compositional principles, particularly the picturesque.

First defned in the late eighteenth century by William Gilpin, the picturesque for nineteenth-century landscape painters was an aesthetic that struck a balance between classical beauty and the overwhelming emotion evoked by the sublime.2 One way that artists created works situated between these two poles was by presenting imagery that was pleasing to the eye, but simultaneously rough or imperfect. In Urao Lagoon, the scraggly fur of the llamas in the foreground, the uneven surface of the rocks surrounding the lagoon, and the coarse texture of the plant life throughout the painting all exemplify this attractive but imperfect aesthetic. A powerful contrast between light and dark is another hallmark of the picturesque, according to Gilpin, and in Urao Lagoon the lower register of the painting is cast in deep shadow. Only the llamas stand in a patch of light and this spot of sun serves as an entry point for the eye, which travels over the hills that frame the lagoon, up to the snow-capped peaks of the Andes.

Bellermann’s choice of this particular view was likely informed by Humboldt’s preference for landscapes that encapsulated many diferent types of plant and animal life. Humboldt was particularly drawn to the equatorial Andes because the landscape progressed from tropical, to temperate, to polar in just a few miles and could be represented easily in a single image.3 Humboldt was so committed to the idea of diversity that in his last book, Cosmos (1849), he suggested it would be appropriate for artists to create variety by embellishing what they observed with what they imagined would complete the composition.4

In Urao Lagoon, Bellermann seems to have taken the creative license that Humboldt advocated. When comparing the imagery on the canvas to the account of the lagoon that Bellermann recorded in his travel journal, there are some discrepancies. In his journal he states that the lagoon was “almost covered” with reeds and heavily populated by aquatic birds, which do not appear in the painting.5 He replaced the reeds with the glassy surface of the lagoon and the birds with the picturesque llamas, an Andean animal that does not exist in Venezuela.6 He also populated the lower third of the painting with scientifcally rendered fnger-like cacti and shrubby mimosas, which appear to have actually been present. He mentions in his journal that the land is “full of cacti and mimosas . . . plátanos, tabaco and sugar cane bushes, with a few isolated coconuts, and bucare trees in bloom, along with corozos and cecropias.”7 The variety of fora along with the transition from tropical to polar ecology made this site perfect for a landscape painting according to Humboldt’s criteria, but Bellermann also felt free to change aspects of what he observed in order to enhance the picturesque qualities of the composition.

Bellermann painted Urao Lagoon seven years after he returned to Germany, and the fact that it was made in the studio rather than on site may also help account for the imagined components. His trip was supported by the King of Prussia, who, at Humboldt’s urging, gave Bellermann a grant to cover his expenses. In exchange for fnancial support, Bellermann agreed to give the king all of the sketches he made in feld. The sponsorship of the Prussian state might imply a colonial agenda for Bellermann’s trip, but in his diaries Bellermann seems unaware of any royal infuence. While Bellermann was seemingly free from the state’s expectations, he was certainly swayed by Humboldt’s example, and continued to see him as a role model even after his return. On Humboldt’s eighty-seventh birthday in 1856, Bellermann sent him a small painting of Caracas with a note saying that it was “a souvenir of our stay in South America that had such importance for science and art.”8

claire pauley mcpherson

Urao Lagoon, Venezuela, 1852

1 Pablo Diener, “Traveling Artists in America: Visions and Views,” Culture & History Digital Journal 1, no. 2 (December 2012): 5.

2 William Gilpin, “Essay on Picturesque Beauty,” (1792) in Joshua C. Taylor, Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 50.

3 Alicia Eve Lubowski, “The Picture of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt and the Tropical American Landscape” (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2009), 40.

4 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, translated from the German by E. C. Otte, vol II. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), 453.

5 Ferdinand Bellermann, “Diario V” in Ferdinand Bellermann et al., Diarios venezolanos, 1842–1845, Ferdinand Bellermann (Caracas: Galería de Arte Nacional, 2007), 251.

6 The presence of llamas in this landscape is one example of the creative license Bellermann took. As noted, this species does not exist in the Venezuelan Andes. Additionally, the llamas do not appear either in the drawing of the Urao Lagoon that accompanies the text in Bellermann’s Venezuelan diaries or the one in the Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin, both of which were drawn in situ.

7 Ferdinand Bellermann, “Diario V,” 251.

8 Alfredo Boulton, “Ferdinand Bellermann en Venezuela” in Ferdinand Bellermann en Venezuela, Memoria del Paisaje 1842–45, exh. cat. (Caracas: Galería de Arte Nacional, 1991), 12.

Ferdinand Bellermann (1814–1889), Germany

Urao Lagoon, Venezuela, 1852

Oil on canvas, 61 × 81.3 cm (24 × 32 inches)

Frederic Edwin Church

Frederic Edwin Church, a leading American nineteenth-century landscape painter, was drawn to nature, science, and observation, and found inspiration in visits to Ecuador in 1853 and 1857. Over the course of a decade, Church painted multiple views of Cotopaxi culminating in his large cataclysmic work of 1862; however, one of his earliest treatments of the subject is in a small painting from 1853. Cotopaxi resulted from Church’s observation of the terrain unique to the Andean region south of Quito, Ecuador, mixed with the tropes of the academic landscape that members of the Hudson River School favored. Rolling hills culminate in the volcano Cotopaxi as it looms over the landscape. Meaning “shining mass” in Quechua, the name refects the bright white cone of snow that tops its peak. The mountain sits in the Cotopaxi plains, an area known for its overwhelming fatness.

The fgure in red in the foreground may be Rafael Salas, a local painter and member of a well-established artistic dynasty. His brother, Ramón Salas, was a watercolorist who depicted local customs and dress in costumbrista works. His father, Antonio Salas, painted heroes of Ecuador’s War of Independence and religious subjects. Church described Antonio in his diary as the most “distinguished” painter in Quito. Close in age to Church, Rafael acted as his guide outside the city. It is possible to imagine that Rafael is the man cloaked in the red overcoat with an exuberant cravat, tri-corner hat, and walking stick. The boldness of the carnelians and crimsons provide a strong contrast to the dark greens and still greyness that clouds the scene. Almost centered in the middle of the painting, the gentleman explorer provides the viewer with an entryway into the landscape. His three-quarter stance opens the vista of what lies behind him, the long path to the snowy peak.

Echoing Rafael’s stance is a large cross on the left of the canvas. Covered in a garland and twice the height of a person, the well-tended cross indicates that this land had been civilized. As part of the Spanish Empire, Ecuador was a territory in the Viceroyalty of Peru and the Viceroyalty of New Granada, and did not achieve independence until 1822. Church’s visit only thirty years later indicated that the country was still under heavy Spanish infuence, and crosses most likely dotted the countryside, especially near volcanoes.1 Early Spanish explorers understood the volcano—an opening into the landscape of molten lava—as a gateway to the underworld. Crosses were intended to maintain a separation between worlds; however, the placement of the cross here was probably a compositional device.

Cotopaxi, 1853

The timing of Church’s visit is a bit of a puzzle. According to his diary, Church had moved to Machachi, a city between Quito and Cotopaxi, by September 9. The next day he moved west of the volcano to San Juan and he was able to ascend the volcano on September 12.2 According to travel accounts, Cotopaxi was actively spewing smoke and underwent one of its most violent eruptions on the night of September 14.3 The placid mood of the painting does not convey this. Is it possible that Church missed the volcanic activity by a mere two days or that his interest in the catalysmic began with his return to Ecuador in 1857? Then, he noted the volcanic activity in his diary, which would spur him to paint his large sublime works.

Ecuador’s unique equatorial topography attracted many naturalists, including Alexander von Humboldt. Books by Humboldt found in Church’s library, such as Personal Narrative; Cosmos; and Aspects of Nature would have prepared him for his journey.4 As expected, Church and other traveler artists encountered lush tropical vegetation accentuated by the snow-capped peaks of Andean volcanoes such as Cotopaxi. Yet, Church’s scientifc observation of these phenomena was combined with an aesthetic choice to fulfll the tenets of the academic landscape by including elements such as palm trees, bodies of water, and a cross, even though the region is in reality fat and barren. This early composition is a small work, yet it is important for two reasons: frst, the painting illustrates one of the earliest approaches to a subject that would prove to be a rich resource for Church over the years, and more signifcantly, Cotopaxi serves as a link between the artistic traditions of Ecuador and the United States.

1 I was told this when I visited Masaya volcano, where a cross still stands. Also see Joan Martí and Gerald Ernst, eds. Volcanoes and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 275.

2 John K. Howat, “Cotopaxi,” in American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), 255. Also see diary entry, Saturday, September 10, 1853, Church Archives and diary entry, Monday, September 12, 1853, Church Archives.

3 Thomas Macfarlane, To the Andes: Being a Sketch of a Trip to South America (Toronto: Belford Brothers, 1877), 96.

4 Katherine Manthorne, Creation & Renewal: Views of Cotopaxi by Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 15–16.

andrianna campbell

Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), United States Cotopaxi, 1853

Oil on canvas, 24.8 × 36.8 cm (9 O × 14 K inches)

Henry Augustus Ferguson

Henry Augustus Ferguson studied painting under George Boughton and Homer Dodge Martin in Albany sometime before 1861, although the exact dates are unknown.1 Between approximately 1855 and 1861 Ferguson painted views of the White Mountains, the Berkshires, and the Hudson River Valley—landscapes that had served as the primary subject matter for the Hudson River School earlier in the century. Unfortunately for Ferguson, public interest in landscape painting had already begun to wane by the 1860s as American genre painting rose to prominence. Perhaps in response to the lack of interest in landscape painting, and inspired by Frederic Church, Ferguson traveled to South America in 1871.

Basing himself in Santiago, Chile, “[Ferguson] spent three years traveling throughout [the continent] . . . favoring Peru . . . [and amassing a] trove of sketches [and paintings] during his travels. He painted in watercolor, as well as oil; several of his South American scenes were included in the 1874 annual exhibition of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors [in New York City].”2 Departing from his earlier landscape paintings, Morning in the Peruvian Andes combines conventions developed by Ferguson’s Hudson River School predecessors with the gestural mark-making of the Impressionists.

While there is no defnitive evidence that Ferguson ever saw Church’s iconic painting, Heart of the Andes, given the painting’s popularity, it is likely that Ferguson was familiar with it.3 However, Ferguson’s image of those mountains difers greatly from Church’s. Unlike Church, Ferguson does not overwhelm the viewer with lush terrain, fora, and fauna. Instead, he focuses on the vast range of the Andes that spans some 5,000 miles across seven countries, and undulates between 4,000 to over 20,000 feet above sea level. Ferguson wanted the viewer to grasp the immensity of the Andes.

The image contains llamas in the lower-left quadrant, animals that are able to survive on the tough ichu grass commonly found in the central and southern Andes.4 Ferguson’s decision to include llamas signals that this is a painting of a South American country. However, unlike Church, who uses the foreground in Heart of the Andes as a stage to exhibit the range of anthropological, botanical, and zoological curiosities of South America, Ferguson chooses to depict only llamas. But, turned away from us, these llamas refuse the scientifc gaze. Instead, they provide a narrative element and act as guides drawing us deeper into the landscape.

Another indication of Ferguson’s resistance to the spectacle of the exotic is his treatment of the two fgures in the lower-left corner. Rather

Morning in the Peruvian Andes, c. 1870

than traditional Quechua dress, Ferguson outfts them in clothing similar to that of North American cattle farmers of the time. Their backs turned to us, they ofer no facial stereotypes. Ferguson presents the act of animal husbandry in South America as not unlike that of the North. Ferguson’s technique is more painterly than that employed by Church, who, like his Hudson River School contemporaries, emphasized precision and detail. Even though Ferguson considered himself a Hudson River School artist, the style of this painting takes on a darker palette and its looser brushwork is more closely aligned with Impressionism.5 Since Impressionism had not yet been popularized when Ferguson traveled to South America, one can speculate that this painting is based on sketches he made on site, but was completed some time after his return to the United States. Ferguson’s whereabouts are undocumented from 1874 to 1879, but he is believed to have traveled to Egypt and Italy. It is therefore possible that Ferguson did not paint this image until some time between 1879 and the mid-1890s, when he was known to be painting only North American landscapes.6 Morning in the Peruvian Andes blends the Hudson River School’s search for the sublime with the expressive brushwork of the Impressionists in a manner that highlights the universally understood afective power of the Andes.

elizabeth lewin

1 George Boughton moved to London in 1861. Frederick White, “George H. Boughton,” The Art Amateur 7, no. 3 (August 1882), 48–49. Henry A. Ferguson’s obituary concedes that the exact date of his birth is unknown and that he in fact never told his age “to even his most intimate confdences.” “Henry A. Ferguson,” American Art News 9, no. 24 (1911): 3.

2 Katherine Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 183.

3 Heart of the Andes was exhibited twice in New York City, in 1859 and again in 1864.

4 While both llamas and alpacas can survive on the ichu grass of the Andean highlands, only llamas are capable of carrying weight. The two llamas closest to us appear to be wearing saddle pads suggesting their use for transport.

5 “Henry A. Ferguson,” American Art News 9, no. 24 (1911): 3. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/25590707.

6 “Henry Augustus Ferguson,” in The National Academy of Design, ed. Virginia Wageman and Phil Freshman (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2004), 353.

Henry Augustus Ferguson (1845–1911), United States Morning in the Peruvian Andes, c. 1870 Oil on canvas, 97.8 × 152.5 cm (38 K × 60 inches)

Alexander François Loemans

Contemporary accounts suggest that Alexander François Loemans was an accomplished showman who found considerable success selling the numerous landscape paintings he produced during the 1860s and 70s in the northeastern and Midwestern United States.1 Best known for scenes of the Rocky Mountains, often peopled by Native American fgures, Loemans began painting Latin American landscapes while he was living in upstate New York. As a keen salesman, he was responding to the demand for such paintings from upper-middle-class collectors, and he identifed in the Andes features similar to those he had painted in his well-known canvases of the Western landscape. The rocky waterfalls, majestic pine trees, and imposing mountain peaks that fll the latter fnd their counterparts in the bright tropical streams, lush palms, and hazy mountain tops of Chimborazo, Queen of the Andes. Loemans’s practice of simultaneously painting scenes of the Andes and the Rockies not only suggests that artists in the United States were looking south to enliven a long-established landscape formula, but that they were also catering to audiences who had a set of expectations about what a tropical landscape should look like. Frederic Edwin Church had originally established the Andes within the popular imagination of artists and audiences in the United States during the late 1850s. Many aspects of Chimborazo suggest that Loemans was a careful observer of Church’s paintings of South America. Whether Loemans saw Church’s The Andes of Ecuador (1855) or his famous Heart of the Andes (1859) when they were exhibited in New York or knew of them through lithographs, signs of Church’s picturesque style fll Loemans’s painting.2 As Church often did, Loemans always organized his tropical landscapes around a central waterfall. In Chimborazo, Loemans frames a gentle fall with a cluster of trees and an outcropping of fora in the foreground, while in the middle ground a range of mountains recedes toward the horizon. A series of intersecting curves formed by waterfalls, rivulets, and mountain silhouettes leads our eye back to blue sky and a snowcapped peak. Church’s picturesque compositional approach, useful for his large-scale compositions meant for public viewing, has been simplifed by Loemans for domestically scaled landscapes such as this. Chimborazo was a signifcant site for Alexander von Humboldt. It supported an entire range of ecosystems, from equatorial to polar region biomes, and he mapped his important study of plant geography on the mountain. Humboldt believed that the extreme variety of fora encountered in the American equatorial landscape endowed it with inherently picturesque qualities 3 For Loemans, Chimborazo

Queen of the Andes, c. 1850

was a marker of exoticism and adventure more than a site of scientifc interest, and he used the mountain primarily as a means to reference a remote location. The painting’s subtitle, Queen of the Andes, suggests that it was a location popularly known to nineteenth-century viewers. Of even greater interest to Loemans than Chimborazo itself were the palm trees that grew there. Palm trees appear in every tropical landscape he produced during the 1860s and 70s, not only marking the locations as exotic, but also displaying an expressive aspect of the artist’s encounter with nature. As Katherine Manthorne has argued, “The palm became a genius loci of these southern regions; its nearly ubiquitous presence in the painted and verbal imagery indicated transport to the Torrid Zone.”4 Manthorne has also shown that the palm was a means for symbolizing the tropical landscape as Eden, and was especially used by Frederic Church as such.5 Loemans’s palms combine close observation with sheer fantasy. In the foreground of Chimborazo, Queen of the Andes, Loemans has elaborated on what may be the genus Scheelea, favored by Church, by adorning the trunks of the three palms with red blossoms and vines. In the middle ground, unadorned, smaller versions of this palm indicate the scene’s depth. In all cases, however, the fronds and trunks of Loemans’s palms appear to bend under the heat and humidity. Possessing a biomorphic quality, his palms convey an experience of the tropical climate analogous to his use of windblown pine trees to convey the harshness of the Rocky Mountains.

Loemans’s output of landscapes such as Chimborazo suggests that it was not necessary for an artist to travel to Latin America to become a well-known painter of tropical landscapes in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. There is no evidence that Loemans traveled to Latin America, although his decision to leave Europe to come to the United States in 1841—after having supposedly studied in Paris—was in many ways typical of his generation. While his early travel through the northeastern United States appeared motivated by his desire to observe and paint key landscapes, this was not the case for long.6 By the 1860s and 70s when he settled in upstate New York—where he most likely made Chimborazo—and then in Minneapolis, he sought markets where he could work and sell his paintings.7 Thus Loeman’s treatment of Chimborazo reveals its prominence in the US imagination, as well as the desire to insert such images of tropical America in the parlors of Minneapolis and Utica.

Chimborazo,

harper montgomery

1 Col. T. J. Kennedy, “A Paper on Art and Professional Artists of Cayuga County,” read at the Cayuga Historical Society (in upstate New York) on March 12, 1878. I heartily thank Dr. William K. Leonard of Saint Paul, Minnesota, for sharing this, and all of his other documents and research on Loemans. All materials from Dr. Leonard’s collection of papers are referred to as Leonard Archive.

2 Loemans exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1870 and 1871, while he was living in Utica, New York; he moved to Minneapolis sometime shortly thereafter.

3 On Humboldt’s interest in Chimborazo see Alicia Lubowski-Jahn, “The Picturesque Atlas: The Landscape Illustrations in Alexander von Humboldt’s Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas,” in Unity of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas (New York: Americas Society, 2014); and regarding Humboldt’s picturesque, see Pablo Diener, “Traveling Artists in America: Visions and Views,” in Culture & History Digital Journal 1, no. 2 (December 2012), 1–14.

4 Katherine Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 13.

5 Ibid , 13–17.

6 In 1854, an unclaimed letter by Loemans in Niagara, New York, suggests that he visited Niagara Falls, and in 1861 he painted the Delaware River. Leonard Archive.

7 “A Pioneer Artist: Alexander Loemans Dies at a Ripe Old Age,” Minneapolis Journal November 18, 1898, 5. Leonard Archive.

Alexander François Loemans (c. 1816–1898)

Netherlands or France, active United States and Canada Chimborazo, Queen of the Andes, c. 1850 Oil on canvas, 45.1 × 70.5 cm (17 O × 27 O inches)

Anton Goering

Though history knows him as Anton Goering, his full name was Christian Anton Goering. Among the many places that Goering visited over the course of his nearly eight-year stay in Venezuela was the Andes region, located in the western extreme of the country, very close to the border with Colombia. In all he would spend three years in the Andean region and the adjacent zone of Lake Maracaibo. It was from the latter warm and low-lying region that Goering began his ascent of the Andes range, or la Cordillera, ultimately arriving in April of 1869 in Mérida, the capital city of the state with the same name, situated on a plateau in the Chama River Valley. The city is located at the feet of the Sierra Nevada, the highest-altitude complex of mountains in the Venezuelan Andes.

The naturalist and painter was fascinated by the city, and took it as his primary place of residence for fve and a half months. “ With regard to its setting, Mérida can justifably be called the pearl of the range. This location has advantages that would be difcult to fnd in another place so small. With an altitude of 1,630 meters above sea level, it has the good fortune of an eternally spring-like climate. . . . In addition, this place is truly the center of the range, such that from here one can arrive in a short time both to the tropical lowlands, as well as upward to the frontiers of eternal snowfall.”1 In efect, Mérida was the point of departure for several excursions that Goering organized to study the city’s surroundings.

Several beautiful watercolors ofer testimony of these excursions to the Andean mountain range, including The Cordillera, Venezuela, with Travelers on a Road, painted two years after the artist and naturalist’s defnitive departure, once he had returned to his homeland. This view is taken from the Páramo of Mucuchíes, located to the northeast of the city of Mérida.2 The ascent to these heights remained permanently fxed in his memory: “Then we began to climb up to the plain itself, over terrain that was at times rocky, and at other times full of clay or mud, ever upward. This path was good for our mounts and we arrived without great difculty to the plain’s pass, at 4,120 meters above sea level. . . . Above the heights of the Páramo of Mucuchíes, the tallest snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada rose up in the background, on the right, while on the left one could see the equally snow-covered chain of the Páramo of Santo Domingo.”3

On the elevated clif, three tiny riders traveling on the backs of mules, possibly including Goering himself, seem to gaze wonderingly at the immensity of the wild landscape opening up before them, hazy

The Cordillera, Venezuela, with Travelers on a Road, 1876

and distant. Making use of aerial perspective, the artist uses transparent and cold blue and green tones, soft ochres and grays and white in the snow and clouds, to accentuate the distance and the enormity of the range. On the most distant visible plane of the pictorial space, one can make out the Sierra Nevada de Mérida in all its splendor, with the masses of majestic Bolívar Peak, the tallest in Venezuela, covered with its perennial snow; and the summit of Humboldt Peak, named in homage to the German scholar for his enormous contributions to the study of the nature of Venezuela. In the work’s central plane, a narrow valley stands out to the right, housing one of the small lakes that are scattered throughout this area.

The soft tones used to portray distance contrast almost theatrically with the browns, lead grays and blacks of the rocks and the earthen clif that serves as a lookout point for the travelers. Thus, the imprecision and poetry with which the remote landscape is represented coexist in this image with the geological rigor of the depiction of the rocky foreground. Among these rocks, to the right, we can also observe the most typical vegetation of the Andean plains, the frailejón (family Asteraceae).

In order to capture the range in all its majestic grandeur, the observer has been situated behind and above the travelers, who are dressed in wide-brimmed hats and blue ponchos or ruanas, the woolen cape typically used by the inhabitants of the Venezuelan and Colombian Andes to protect themselves from the intense cold of the high plains.

rafael romero d.

1 Christian Anton Goering, Venezuela: The Most Beautiful Tropical Country, trans. María Luisa G. De Blay (Mérida: University of the Andes, 1962), 83.

2 Translator’s note: the páramo is a high plains ecosystem unique to the Andes.

3 Goering, Venezuela, 113.

Anton Goering (1836–1905), Germany

The Cordillera, Venezuela, with Travelers on a Road, 1876

Watercolor on paper, 45.1 × 59.1 cm (17 O × 23 N inches)

The Heart of the Peruvian Andes is one of Norton Bush’s grandest and most compelling paintings of the Latin American landscape. In this scene, Bush—the frst professional landscape painter in San Francisco— has created a wild Eden of “dramatic gorges and verdant foliage against a backdrop of lowering mountains.”1 The lush vegetation that surrounds the two fgures in the foreground is in sharper focus than the towering Andes in the background. The valley is “enclosed by peaks and domes similar to the Yosemite,” as one reporter-critic observed when the painting was frst shown in San Francisco.2 Bush had seen the Andes in 1875, when, like his peers in the United States—including Frederic Edwin Church, Titian Peale, and Martin Johnson Heade—he took advantage of the newly established steamboat and railroad lines to head south to Central and South America in search of more colorful subjects.

Contributing to this desire for exploration were books such as Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos, Washington Irving’s Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, and Henry David Thoreau’s writings on the discoveries of Raleigh, Cortés, Balboa, and Pizarro. The Heart of the Peruvian Andes represents the spirit of adventure that motivated many American artists in the second half of the nineteenth century to seek more spectacular and exotic landscapes to paint. American economic ambitions in Central and South America also fgured in the creation of Bush’s work.

Bush made this painting during his last trip to Latin America between June 1875 and May 1876. His frst journey to Latin America occurred in 1853 because, before the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, he had to pass through Nicaragua to travel from New York to California by rail. In 1875, he was invited to Peru by Henry Meiggs, a mining and railroad entrepreneur, who commissioned Bush to produce a series of paintings of the Peruvian Andes. Bush painted scenes of railways owned and recently constructed by Meiggs in the Andes, and he visited the area surrounding Ecuador’s Guayas River. The following year, the Daily Alta California reported that Bush was, “ . . . busily employed upon a number of large pictures comprising views of Chile which are commissions from Mr. Meiggs.”3 It is believed that The Heart of the Peruvian Andes may have initiated as a commissioned work for Meiggs.4

It is very likely that Bush was encouraged by Church to specialize in tropical views. Bush’s early work demonstrates many afnities with the realism of Church and the Hudson River School, with the detailed fora, the deep perspective, and the distant towering mountains seen in The Heart of the Peruvian Andes. Yet Bush’s mountain scenes also

The Heart of the Peruvian Andes: A View from the Arequipa Valley with Mt. Chachani in the Distance, Peru, 1877

difer from those by Church in their more frequent depiction of bodies of water, fantastic coloration, and the presence of more fgures. They lack the dramatic, sublime quality of Church’s mountain scenes, but they are, according to one critic, “showy” and “strikingly beautiful.”5 Church’s enduring painting, The Heart of the Andes (1859), was regarded by its American audiences as having captured the soul of the tropics, and the similar title of Bush’s work may have been intended as a challenge to Church’s earlier painting.

In The Heart of the Peruvian Andes, we see a monumental mountain range of whites and tans in the background with peaks that jut out into the clear blue sky, and green hills that occupy the middle ground. The Andes and its foothills are less detailed and in softer focus than the rocks, wall, and luxurious vegetation in the foreground. At the bottom of the canvas, a fgure with a donkey bearing a sack heads down a dirt road. The two tall trees on the left side of the canvas stand out, as does the hot pink plant on the lower right. The fgures traversing the dirt road and the detailed fora guide the viewer from the verdant bottom of the painting to the vast and hazy depth of the mountains and the sky.

Such tropical landscapes were popular in San Francisco at the time. Many of its residents had traveled to California from the East Coast before 1869 at the height of the Gold Rush via South America’s Cape Horn or the Isthmus of Panama, and had developed a taste for the landscapes seen on their journeys. Americans believed in the concept of Manifest Destiny, and saw opportunities for gold and goods in Central and South America. The tropics were regarded as a mysterious new Eden still in formation, and appealed to the attitude of Romanticism popular in California and the rest of the United States. Bush’s market in California was therefore assured, and he arguably became the best known of the California artists.

alex c. maccaro

1 Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, California Art: 450 Years of Painting and other Media (Los Angeles: Dustin Publications, 1998), 62.

2 Daily Alta California, May 27, 1876.

3 Ibid.

4 Unfortunately, Meiggs died in 1877 in Lima, the year this painting was completed. The San Francisco Call-Bulletin mentions Meiggs’s commission. See San Francisco Call-Bulletin, July 24, 1877 and San Francisco Call-Bulletin, July 31, 1877.

5 Frank Leslie, Illustrated Newspaper, January 10, 1874.

Norton Bush

Norton Bush (1834–1894), United States

The Heart of the Peruvian Andes: A View from the Arequipa Valley with Mt. Chachani in the Distance, Peru, 1877

Oil on canvas, 111.8 × 184.2 cm (44 × 72 K inches)

Auguste Borget

In 1837 Auguste Borget boarded a merchant ship traveling to South America. Leaving behind the Parisian art world, he began a selfinitiated “Grand Tour” of the exotic Southern Hemisphere which would lead him through Latin America to China and eventually on to Southeast Asia.1 Borget was captivated by the South American landscape, and passages from his journals communicate the euphoria he felt upon discovering it for himself. He wrote of his ship’s landing near Rio de Janeiro in near-rapturous terms: “After a fairly long crossing . . . we approached the coast where the sweetest breeze brought us the most beautiful perfumes. Day surprised us on the bridge in an environment and an ecstasy. When the sun appeared in all its majesty on the horizon . . . the crests of the waves were illuminated and all of a sudden the sky revealed a rainbow in all its beautiful colors. Covered from base to summit in a vegetation so powerful it seemed to want to sufocate the islands, the hills, the mountains bathed in a scintillating light, ofered a richness, a variety of tones such that my eye could not choose which one to sweetly rest upon.”2

Many of Borget’s drawings made throughout Latin America echo the fairytale-like dreaminess of his written record. Borget’s Convent on Morro dos Sinais at Rio de Janeiro shows nothing of the city’s bustling mercantile trade. Instead, Borget depicts the back of a secluded church isolated on a bluf, deserted except for the company of a few picturesque colonial ruins.3 The buildings fade away at their bases, as though foating without foundations in the Brazilian jungle. The ephemeral efect produced by Borget’s light handling of the graphite is enhanced by luxurious foliage and lofty clouds, upon which Borget lavishes almost as much attention as upon the church itself.

It was typical for nineteenth-century oil painters to embellish their fnal products to increase the dramatic theatricality of their works, but feld sketches like Borget’s works in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) were usually created as the basis for larger works, and therefore meant to be near-photographic in accuracy. These works were composed quickly, on location, to capture as precisely as possible atmospheric efects, details of fora, fauna, and geography. As feld sketches, Borget’s drawings probably do depict real places with a reliable degree of accuracy. Nevertheless, Borget’s imagining of Latin America as a distant wonderland “colors” his black-and-white works with a degree of Romanticism that manifests itself in the scenes he chooses and the notable omission of human fgures in many of his landscapes.

Convent on Morro dos Sinais at Rio de Janeiro, 1837

Near Mendoza, 1837

Near Mendoza, 1837

Wooded Landscape, 1837

Two sketches made near the city of Mendoza in Argentina demonstrate Borget’s verist lyricism. In the heart of the Argentinian Cordillera near the Chilean border, Mendoza was far of the beaten path. Borget’s presence there demonstrates his commitment to experiencing a wide range of South American landscapes, but the sketches he produced there ring with the same calm classicism as his image of the convent. As with the sketch made near Rio de Janeiro, Borget chose to sketch in the rural environs of Mendoza. The setting for each sketch is a rustic farmhouse nested beneath the Andes, which rise protectively in the distance. Each ranch house is shaded by billowing trees and surrounded by tall grasses. Adobe buildings are arranged in the center of each composition and both feature a large dome; one view also includes a structure with a façade in the style of a Greek temple, making the building seem almost Palladian and giving the composition a distinctly classical feel. Borget erases many indications of time and place, most noticeably by omitting landmarks and human fgures. The only indications of the work’s American setting are the Andes and the inclusion of a small covered wagon and a pair of stray cattle.

Why would an artist traveling to a foreign land for the purpose of observing exotic landscapes create such a nonspecifc image? Part of the reason might be that Borget expected to use his sketches as the building blocks for future oil paintings based on his foreign travels. Thus he would have wanted these images to be malleable, capable of being worked into a variety of more elaborate scenes. But part of the reason may also have been the strong pull of the European neoclassical style in which he was trained, and memories of earlier sketching trips to Italy.

Borget’s sketches in the CPPC are typical of his Latin American oeuvre as a whole: cupolas pepper the countryside, ramshackle sheds and horse-drawn carts sit lazily in empty felds, mountains hang protectively over sleepy villages. In a few sketches Borget includes a costumbrista-style portrait of a local, most often an itinerant cowboy, beggar, or traveler like himself. The quietness of his sketches belies the animation of Borget’s written record of the trip. One would never expect, for example, that Borget’s scenes near Mendoza were undertaken after having been threatened by Indians and encountering a woman reminiscent of a fairytale witch.4 The diferences in tone at frst seem jarring, but a side-by-side comparison of sketchbook and notebook demonstrates how text and image complement one another to

create a balanced description of Borget’s Latin American wanderings. Sometimes sensational and sometimes bucolic, this traveler artist’s narrative—both written and drawn—was always infuenced in part by the Old World and in part by the New.

danielle stewart

1 To date, Borget’s Asian sketches have attracted the most attention from collectors and academics, but the Latin American sketches that precede them demonstrate the artist’s keen eye for detail and lyrical landscape composition; for more information, see Sophie Cazé, Auguste Borget: Peintre-voyageur autour du monde: Dessins & peintures: exposition du 19 mars au 28 juin 1999 (Issoudun, France: Musée de l’hospice Saint-Roch, 1999).

2 Auguste Borget, Fragments d’un voyage autour du monde (Moulins: Desrosiers, 1845–46), n.p.

3 For more on the insertion of ruins into South American landscapes see Katherine Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 100–108.

4 David James, En Las Pampas y Los Andes: Treinta y Tres Dibujos y Textos sobre Argentina, Chile y Peru de Auguste Borget (Buenos Aires: Oardo-Emece, 1960), 28–30.

Auguste Borget (1808–1877), France

Convent on Morro dos Sinais at Rio de Janeiro, 1837

Graphite and white chalk on paper, 21 × 36.8 cm (8 N × 14 K inches)

Auguste Borget (1808–1877), France

Near Mendoza, 1837

Graphite on paper, 23.8 × 18.2 cm (9 W × 7 V inches)

Auguste Borget (1808–1877), France

Near Mendoza, 1837

Graphite on paper, 23.8 × 18.2 cm (9 W × 7 V inches)

Auguste Borget (1808–1877), France

Wooded Landscape, 1837

Graphite on paper, 21 × 36.8 cm (8 N × 14 K inches)

M A N A N D N A T U R E

BOTANICALS

RUINS

FIGURES IN THE LANDSCAPE

BOTANICALS

In the wake of Columbus’s voyage, travelers to the Americas were awed by the luxuriance of nature and fecundity of the landscape. They were also infuenced by the mandate from the Spanish crown to discover new species that would bolster their country’s economy. The Codex Badiano of 1552 was the frst botanical text produced in the postconquest Hispanic colonies. Sent as a gift to Philip II, it dealt with the medicinal properties of plants as prescribed by the Nahua. A contemporaneous manuscript by Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, contained botanical references and drawings, as well as perceptive commentary such as, “the eyes are a great part of our intelligence of these things.”1 After 1735, when Carl Linnaeus introduced his taxonomic system of classifying plants by their external characteristics in Systema naturae, a methodical arrangement focusing on individual specimens and their minute characteristics became the dominant mode of botanical illustration. Using Linnaeus’s system, Spanish botanical expeditions collected over 12,000 specimens that were recorded, but frequently not published.

Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin’s Selectarum stirpium Americanarum Historia (1763) was a particularly popular volume often taken on voyages. It referenced not only a plant’s Linnean taxonomy but also provided a textual description of its visual properties and habitat. Its descriptive and unifed style was similar to the later botanical writings of Alexander von Humboldt.

The prolifc scientist, explorer, and author Alexander von Humboldt made numerous contributions to nineteenth-century botanical literature and thought. His frst, and probably most important, was the Physical Table of the Equinoctial Regions included in Essay on The Geography of Plants (1807), the inaugural publication to appear after his historic journey to the Americas that took place from 1799 to 1804. Here one sees plants arranged in their natural habitat and organized vertically along the fanks of the Chimborazo volcano. Humboldt places them in a unifed atmosphere wherein he measured over twenty attendant environmental factors, including variations in temperature, air pressure, humidity, and even the color of the sky. Then a unique way of describing the habitats of plants, his account was the beginning of the science of plant geography as it is known today. Published the following year, Aspects of Nature addressed the “physiognomy of plants” and singled out species such as the palm and the cactus, along with other natural phenomena. Concurrently the text featured many descriptive passages that evoked the exotic and picturesque, refecting Humboldt’s post-Enlightenment training in Romantic-era Germany.

At the end of his life, Humboldt published his fve-volume magnum opus, Cosmos. In the second volume, which appeared in 1847, he discussed landscape painting:

Colored sketches, taken directly from nature, are the only means by which the artist, on his return, may reproduce the character of distant regions in more elaborately fnished pictures; . . . The possession of such correctly-drawn and well-proportioned sketches will enable the artist to dispense with all the deceptive aid of hothouse forms and socalled botanical delineations.2

Humboldt’s fusion of art and science and his exhortations to paint the foliage and attendant physical details outlined a new approach to botanical illustration, adding a decidedly artistic empathy that gave the subject an expanded contextual content. It was a profound change from the earlier trope of empirically based botanical renderings, and introduced a style of expressiveness that many traveler artists employed.

georgia de havenon

1 Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Spanish Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 36.

2 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 2 (1847) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 94.

Physical Table of the Equinoctial Regions from Essay on the Geography of Plants, engraving with watercolor by Louis Bouquet, drawing by Lorenz Schönberger and Pierre Turpin, after a sketch by Alexander von Humboldt

Albert Berg

Albert Berg’s two drawings, both titled Palms, Bamboo, and Tropical Foliage, Colombia (1854) were made after a trip to New Granada in 1848–49, his frst and only journey to South America. Inspired by Alexander von Humboldt’s writings, Berg abandoned a career in law to record the tropics for himself. While critics have described his drawings as “artistically not very meaningful,” they also qualifed them as “ highly cleanly executed” and “scientifcally valuable,” aspects of Berg’s work that Humboldt recognized and championed. In fact, Berg directly expressed Humboldt’s twofold concern: “the union of aesthetic interpretation and truthfulness to nature.”1

Berg arrived in New Granada at the beginning of October in 1848 or 1849 and remained long enough to study what he described in an 1854 account of his travels as “the hot district of the Magdalena River in the rainy season, and the mountains of Quindiú during the dry season.”2 He also reported that he prepared studies for drawings and engravings while there, spending his time “principally on the river Magdalena, in the eastern Cordillera between Ocaña and Santa Fé de Bogotá, and in the Cordillera de Quindiú, on the mountain pass between Ibargué and Cartago.”3 Noticing the wide range of environments, he marveled that “nearly all the climates of the globe are to be met with here in a small space . . . while on the coast and on the banks of the Magdalena a middle temperature prevails, the summits of the Cordilleras rise to the heights of everlasting snow,” an indication also of the great botanic variety he would encounter.4

Many of Berg’s drawings made in, or based on, sketches from New Granada were compiled into an oversized volume, Physiognomy of Tropical Vegetation in South America; A Series of Views Illustrating the Primeval Forests on the River Magdalena and in the Andes of New Granada, published in 1854 in London.5 In addition to sixteen lithographs annotated with descriptions of the plants they illustrate, the book includes passages from a letter that Humboldt wrote to Berg. The volume also serves as proof of a mission completed. As Pablo Diener notes, Berg should be credited for success in publishing an illustrated catalogue of plant species in New Granada. In the 1830s, the artist Johann Moritz Rugendas had proposed a similar, if more expansive, project for recording plant species in Mexico according to Humboldt’s classifcation and within their particular environments, but it was never realized.6

In Physiognomy, Berg described palms similar to those seen in the two drawings at hand. Native to the region of Quindiú, the palms were

Palms, Bamboo, and Tropical Foliage, Colombia, 1854

Palms, Bamboo, and Tropical Foliage, Colombia, 1854

known as “one of the most vigorous [of its species], even by such travelers as are acquainted with other parts of the tropics.” Berg specifcally identifed two types of palms that endow the “ landscape physiognomy” with a “special peculiarity.”7 They are Oreodoxa frigida and a wax palm called Ceroxylon andicola, which he described as perhaps the tallest species of palm known. The level of detail in Berg’s drawings permitted the identifcation of the palm trees, and is confrmed in his specifc annotation on the verso. Humboldt especially admired palm trees, not only because their great height matched such monuments as the Berlin city castle but also because of their display of “great character.” He referred to the heavy crown of palms as “serious and melancholic.”8 Humboldt’s response and his interest in the palms suggest that Berg may have been motivated to make works that specifcally and prominently featured these trees.

Despite his relative obscurity, Berg is considered as part of a group of artists—which also included Ferdinand Bellermann, Eduard Hildebrandt, and Johann Moritz Rugendas—who all subscribed to Humboldt’s strict principles for a precise depiction of foreign landscapes that might be of service to science. Berg’s drawings are recognizable for their precision of line, the careful scaling of one plant against another, and the level of detail that he accorded to single specimens that were clearly identifed by their Latin name in the captions. Rather than presenting a removed vista for the viewer to contemplate, Berg’s compositions place the spectator in the midst of the scene. Humboldt discerned this real sense of place in the drawings: in the letter to the artist printed in Physiognomy, he noted that through the artist’s depictions he felt as if he were truly walking with him “from the heights of the cordillera into the low laws of the Valley of Magdalena.”9 Countering his critics, Berg accomplished the Humboldtian marriage of science and art; in these two drawings, particularly, his twofold commitment to scientifc accuracy and aesthetic depiction clearly shines.10

paula kupfer

1 Petra Werner, Naturwahrheit und asthetische Umsetzung: Alexander von Humboldt im Briefwechsel mit bildenden Kunstlern (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013), 114.

2 Albert Berg, Physiognomy of Tropical Vegetation in South America: A Series of Views Illustrating the Primeval Forests on the River Magdalena and in the Andes of New Granada (London: Colnaghi, 1854), 9.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 The book was published by art publisher Colnaghi, as well as by the German Julius Buddeus, and included a preface authored by Frederick Klotzsch. The publication was made possible in great part by Humboldt’s ongoing support and endorsement.

6 Pablo Diener, “Traveling Artists in America: Visions and Views,” Culture & History Digital Journal (vol. 1), no. 2 (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2012.m106.

7 Berg, Physiognomy of Tropical Vegetation in South America, 10.

8 Werner, Naturwahrheit und asthetische Umsetzung, 92.

9 Berg, Physiognomy of Tropical Vegetation in South America, 7–8.

10 Werner, Naturwahrheit und asthetische Umsetzung, 110.

Albert Berg (1825–1884), Germany

Palms, Bamboo, and Tropical Foliage, Colombia, 1854

Charcoal and ink on paper, 39.7 × 25.4 cm (15 X × 10 inches)

Albert Berg (1825–1884), Germany

Palms, Bamboo, and Tropical Foliage, Colombia, 1854

Charcoal, chalk, and ink on paper, 45.1 × 31.7 cm (17 O × 12 K inches)

Anton Goering

These two watercolors painted by Anton Goering during his scientifc expedition in Venezuela from 1866–74 speak to the artist’s primary purpose: to document the wealth of the region’s biota. The two other works by Goering reproduced in this publication, which were painted once the artist returned to Germany, present vast views that reveal the splendor of the region (see pp. 125 and 155). These watercolors, on the other hand, are tighter in their focus and demonstrate his desire to record individual species in their broader environment. The color palette of these two watercolors is also indicative of their function. Whereas the works Goering produced upon his return to Europe use pastel colors to create a soft atmosphere and glowing light, these watercolors employ intense greens, blues, and browns to depict the density of the tropical vegetation.

Commissioned by the Zoological Society of London, of which he was a member, Goering’s mission was to paint and draw Venezuela’s geography, as well as identify and collect specimens of fora and fauna. In the travel account he recorded after his return, Goering mentioned the particular equipment he carried for painting and collecting specimens: arsenic soap to prepare birds, cotton and paper to wrap the cadavers once they were ready, and boxes with cork bases soaked in carbonic acid to keep delicate insects intact. Cardboard was required as a support for the fne European paper that would otherwise have torn in the humid environment. Traveling by boat, foot, and horseback, Goering took advantage of each stop to collect plants and animals, and spent his evenings preparing what he had collected.1

The frst stop of Goering’s nearly eight years of travel through Venezuela was Carúpano, a port city on the Caribbean coast. Carúpano, Venezuela depicts the coastal mountains on the outskirts of the city. In this watercolor Goering uses great detail to represent the varied individual forms of the plants in the foreground. A couple of low-lying palms are depicted on the left and in the center, and a few taller trees with whitish gray branches protrude out of this plant mass. A fallen trunk points towards a tree with a wide, low, spreading habit of growth. Other species of trees are entangled with thin vines that swing down toward the ground. This array of plants seems to extend indefnitely toward the horizon where it meets a cloudy blue sky with three soaring birds. Fold lines that divide the painting into quadrants can be seen and are possibly the result of folding for convenience of transport during travel.

For the European traveler, the wide variety of plant life lent the tropics a picturesque quality. In Goering’s travel account, he wrote

Carúpano, Venezuela, n.d. Flamingos in a Lake, Venezuela, c. 1867

“But, what bounty of shapes and colors charm the eye . . . !”2 The diversity of plants in the tropics, even within a small area, was an aweinspiring sight for a naturalist accustomed to the vegetation of the northern latitudes. Goering continued, “While the individual forms are more striking than in our own forests, here they all intermix forming an impressive grandiosity. While at home even the most varied woods consists in relatively few species frequently occupying a stretch of many square miles, in the tropical forest we fnd hundreds of diferent plants all located on a few square meters.”3

From Carúpano Goering continued traveling along the coast, visiting Puerto Cabello and Lake Valencia, located in the north-central region of the country. The environs of Lake Valencia proved to be excellent grounds for collecting. In a report Goering wrote to the Zoological Society in 1869, he said “The Lake of Valencia seems to be a station for birds which come from the llanos and from the river-districts of the south of Venezuela. When the swamps and the llanos are dry, thousands of birds resort to it.”4

The watercolor Flamingos in a Lake likely represents an inlet of Lake Valencia surrounded by lush tropical vegetation, minutely registered by the artist. Vines hang from the palm trees on the left, and low-lying plants creep from the shore into the water, creating a marshy scene. Aquatic birds have settled temporarily on an isolated branch foating in the water, and a group of famingoes stand at the water’s edge in the foreground. Under Goering’s European gaze, this humid and densely vegetated landscape would have been an ideal representation of the tropics.

sara meadows

1 Christian Anton Goering, Von Tropische tiefande zum ewigen schenne (Leipzig, 1893), trans. Julieta Fombona, Venezuela, the Most Beautiful Country in the Tropics: from the tropical lowlands to the perpetual snows (Maracay: Playco Editores, 1999).

2 Ibid., 32.

3 Ibid., 33.

4 P. L. Sclatek and Osbert Salvin, “On Venezuelan Birds collected by Mr. A. Goering,” Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 37, no. 1 (January 1869): 251.

Anton Goering (1836–1905), Germany Carúpano, Venezuela, n.d.

Watercolor on paper, 21 × 39.7 cm (8 N × 15 X inches)

Anton Goering (1836–1905), Germany

Flamingos in a Lake, Venezuela, c. 1867

Watercolor on paper, 14.6 × 25.4 cm (5 O × 10 inches)

Charles de Wolf Brownell

Charles de Wolf Brownell trained in Hartford, Connecticut, at a time when the Hartford Daily Courant could claim that the only advantage Paris had over Hartford was the “wide selection of tints and colors.”1 Equidistant from both New York City and Boston, the city experienced a cosmopolitan wellspring at mid-century centered on patrons such as Samuel Colt and Daniel Wadsworth, who actively commissioned artists to paint imagery relating to their industrial prowess. Colt, for example, famously sent the artist George Catlin to South America to depict the Colt rife’s profciency for exotic game hunting. Brownell’s extracted depictions of the Cuban landscape refected the attitude of his patrons, primarily de Wolf family members and their fellow sugar plantation owners, each of whom preferred to recall the land as a locus of beauty rather than strife.

The small but bustling city of Hartford was making a transition from an agricultural heritage to an industrial economy. This may have been jarring for Brownell, who had a strong connection to nature and thus had sought a new Eden on the island of Cuba. Furthermore, American illustrated magazines began to tout the recuperative powers of the virgin beauty of the Cuban landscape, which would have appealed to a man who sufered both physical and psychological ailments: congestion of the lungs and the stresses of the moral dilemmas of career and family. In Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1853, Aldof Hoefer wrote “I have felt the emotions of delight which fll the heart when the purple hills of Managua are frst seen looking up in the distance, like monsters in repose on the bosom of the ocean. . . . I have climbed the glorious mountains of the island, revelled in the wealth of verdure which garnish its plains, and have bathed in its clear rivers.”2 The author’s revelatory descriptions of the wild beauty of the island would have surely appealed to the artist, and with the fnancial and physical support of his family’s sugar plantations he set of for seven consecutive winters there starting in 1856.

While much of the artist’s early work in Cuba seems to have focused on commissions from sugar plantation owners, Brownell was simultaneously making detailed watercolor paintings of magnifcent fora and fauna. In Jaguey Tree, Male or Female he paints the massive trunk of a Cuban jagüey tree at center, which dwarfs the more commonplace palm on the right. Giving further credence to the scale of the arboreal wonder, a well-dressed fgure takes a respite under the refreshing shade of the enormous tree. Brownell’s choice to depict this particular species is certainly related to island pride but may also have a deeper

Jagüey Tree, Male or Female, 1856

meaning. The jagüey is also known for its deadly associations, in that it seeks to support other plants that it then gradually embraces before choking—it has locally been associated for some time with ingratitude and treachery. Perhaps this symbolism is a nod to the disparity between the glowing dreams of Cuba and its raw realities. The artist notes “macho o hembra,” referring to the fg-like fruit that the tree produces along with many tiny male or female fowers. Images such as this may have been intended as initial compositions for a larger oil painting; however, this example displays a remarkable degree of fnish and includes a fgure that hints at a personal narrative.

1 The Hartford Daily Courant, October 8, 1855.

2 Adolf Hoefer, “Three Weeks in Cuba. By an Artist,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 6 (January 1853): 167.

alison petretti

Charles de Wolf Brownell (1822–1909), United States

Jaguey Tree, Male or Female, 1856

Watercolor and graphite on paper mounted on board, 21.6 × 13.3 cm (8 K × 5 N inches)

José María Velasco

José María Velasco’s depictions of the ahuehuete tree synthesize Mexico’s natural and historical landscapes. This dual investigation of the nation’s rich natural ecology and historical events through landscape art is evident as early as 1865. That year, the painter, already an art student at Mexico City’s Academy of San Carlos, enrolled in the Academy of Medicine, and joined an archaeological team as a draftsman at the Mesa of Metlaltoyucan. Velasco’s study of various branches of natural history pervades his landscape paintings. In turn, Velasco’s broad engagement with Mexico’s archaeological discoveries and history is refected in pictures that connect nature to events drawn from preColumbian archaeology, the colonial era, and the republican period. Velasco’s Ahuehuete typifes a landscape art aesthetic infused with historical narrative and careful attention to scientifc accuracy.1

In this study of trees and shrubs, Velasco’s technical skill and taxonomic exactitude are notable. His delicate rendering of distinct vegetation with gradations of green and contrasting leaf forms reveals his close observation of nature and knowledge of botany. In this work, the ahuehuete tree can be distinguished from the other fora by its more yellow coloring and greater height. The oil composition on paper is in keeping with Velasco’s practice of plein air painting.2 Velasco’s landscape painting instructor at the Academy of San Carlos, Eugenio Landesio (1810–1879), nurtured Velasco’s scientifc and artistic taste. He instructed his students to take along “a natural history dictionary, long-distance binoculars, and a metal can to carry plants” while sketching outdoors.3 Velasco’s enthusiasm for botany was such that he brought his botanical instruments along with his paint supplies during frequent visits to nearby Chapultepec forest. In addition, he maintained a garden with his brother Idelfonso, which served as research for his illustrations and publications.4

The importance of the ahuehuete tree as a subject for Velasco is refected in the number of related paintings and sketches he made, revisiting the subject numerous times throughout his career. Although not stated in its title, the location of this landscape study is likely Chapultepec Forest given the forest’s popularity in nineteenth-century Mexican literature and art.5 Moreover, several other depictions of ahuehuetes by Velasco, which date to the 1870s, are situated in this park.6

Even without fgures or architecture as reference to a past event, Mexican audiences would have understood the historical evocations of Ahuehuete, which translates into English as “upright drum in water” or “old man of the water,” and is derived from the Nahuatl language

Ahuehuete, c. 1870–75

signifying the tree’s longevity and growth in watery habitats.7 The tree’s sacred status in Mesoamerica was noted by colonial chroniclers who observed that the tree was planted near temples.8 The tree’s signifcance is also documented in the context of Spain’s conquest of Mexico. The historic tree sheltered a despondent Hernán Cortés as he wept beneath its boughs on July 10, 1520, the so-called noche triste (sad night) after Spain’s defeat by the Mexica. Velasco’s 1910 watercolor Ahuehuete and the Noche Triste (Popotla) makes the association between the tree and this historic episode explicit.

The massive circumference of its multistem trunk, surpassing that of a sequoia tree, captivated nineteenth-century travelers to Mexico— including Alexander von Humboldt, Désiré Charnay, Johann Moritz Rugendas, Eduard Hildebrandt, and Frederic Edwin Church. These visitors to the Americas were drawn to unique and outsized spectacles of American tropical nature. In particular, they marveled at the ahuehuete in the village of Santa María de Tule (Oaxaca) for its extraordinary age of over two thousand years and giant circumference of approximately thirty-six meters (118 feet).9 In the context of these dramatic specimens, Velasco’s Ahuehuete study stands out as understated.

alicia lubowski-jahn

1 This aesthetic sensibility of referencing history through landscape was infuenced by the classical ideal landscape tradition perfected by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. See Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 130–49.

2 Juan Antonio Perujo Cano et al., La Materia del arte: Jose Maria Velasco y Hermenegildo Bustos (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte, 2004), 31.

3 My translation of the Spanish text in Andrés Reséndiz Rodea and Adolfo Castañón, José María Velasco 1840–1912, ed. Víctor Mantilla González (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte, 2012), 19.

4 Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation, 150.

5 Ibid., 132–8.

6 María Elena Altamirano Piolle, Homenaje Nacional José María Velasco (1840–1912) (Mexico City: Amigos del Museo Nacional de Arte, 1993), 163–6.

7 Carmen González García, “Los arboles y las fores como emblemas nacionales en países de América Latina y el Caribe: México y países de América Central,” Revista del Jardín Botánico Nacional 32/33 (2011–12): 243.

8 Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation, 136, 192, note 16.

9 González García, “Los arboles y las fores,” 243.

José María Velasco (1840–1912), Mexico

Ahuehuete, c. 1870–75

Oil on board, 30.8 × 43.5 cm (12 V × 17 V inches)

Adolfo Methfessel

A Swiss national who lived in Buenos Aires for thirty years, Félix Ernst Adolfo Methfessel traveled to Paraguay from 1872–73, revisiting the sites where he had witnessed and chronicled the Paraguayan War from 1865 until its end in 1870. Also known as the War of the Triple Alliance, the confict joined the forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay against Paraguay. Commissioned by the politician and writer Estanislao S. Zeballos to make a series of watercolors of the battles for his unpublished book Historia del Paraguay, Methfessel also depicted the landscape of Paraguay during his trip.

In this painting we see a lagoon surrounded by palm trees, and a clear sky in the background. These aspects of the middle ground and distance are framed by dense vegetation, placing us within a dark and swampy forest. Methfessel’s range of tight and loose brushstrokes—the former to describe plants in detail and the latter to treat fora more generally— allows identifcation of many regional plants from the Chaco region, such as the caranday palm or Copernicia alba, and shows generic vegetation, such as the dark mass of vines and leaves in the left-foreground.

The similarity of Landscape to another work by Methfessel titled Ipacari Lagoon Landscape (c. 1870), suggests that this painting depicts the same region, east of Asunción.1 If he made both paintings during the same trip in which he revised battle scenes such as Itororo—not far from the Ipacarai Lagoon then Landscape dates around 1873. Another possibility is that Methfessel made Landscape after 1889, the year he was hired by the Museum of Natural Science of La Plata to tour Argentina, documenting and painting the landscape. During this trip, he painted views of the provinces of Catamarca and Santa Cruz, including the indigenous ruins in the Valley of Santa Marín in Andalgalá, and natural landscapes in the Sierra del Aconquija, Loma Rica, Santa Cruz River, and other territories on the border of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay such as the Cataratas del Iguazú, which he depicted in 1893.2 During these trips, he made sketches which he would later use to paint largescale landscape paintings. His paintings often appear to have required much efort and application on his part, frequently combining the realism of harsh landscapes, such as the Argentinian forest, with the romanticism and powerful drama of waterfalls and rapids.

During the late nineteenth century, the River Plate region became an important backdrop for the depiction of traditions, costumes, and war. Although present in their works, landscape was not the central focus of the River Plate artists, who included Cándido López, Jean-León Pallière, and Juan Manuel Blanes. They were not looking for efects of

Landscape, n.d.

the sublime and picturesque, as Alexander von Humboldt had urged artists to do. As Laura Malosetti has asked, “Where is the European gaze on the nineteenth-century pampas? What was that gaze like? It has been called ‘imperial eyes,’ also a ‘magisterial gaze,’ meant to colonize, dominate, tame, from the point of view, the distance and the perspective used to build that century ’s landscapes, in the time of imperialist and territorial expansion. We can hardly see any of this in the few nineteenth-century paintings of the pampas.”3 Even though Methfessel here used the conventions of the picturesque, blending a scientifc and artistic eye, his work was a rare record of such a “European gaze” on the pampas. He was, after all, documenting war, costumes, and nature for museums such as the Museo de Ciencias Naturales de La Plata and Museo Público de Buenos Aires, thereby contributing to the national project of the region.

Although Methfessel was a traveler from Switzerland, to a degree he straddled local and European concerns: on the one hand he saw the Rioplatese landscape as a site of confict and war, and on the other, as a site of scientifc and picturesque interest.

1 Laguna Ipacarai, Paraguay, c. 1870. Oil on canvas, 48 × 64 cm. Private collection, Buenos Aires.

2 Cataratas del Iguazú, 1893. Oil on canvas, 75 × 150 cm. Private collection, Buenos Aires.

3 Laura Malosetti, “Politics, Desire, and Memory in the Construction of Landscape in the Argentine Pampas,” in Journal of Visual Art Practice 5, no. 1 (2006): 116.

silvia benedetti

Adolfo Methfessel (1836–1909), Switzerland Landscape, n.d.

Oil on board, 21.6 × 30.5 cm (8 K ×12 inches)

RUINS

The crumbling remains of Central and South America were a source of mounting curiosity in the early nineteenth century. Inspired by the expeditions and writings of Alexander von Humboldt, many sought to follow in the great explorer’s footsteps—and Mesoamerica became a particularly prime area for exploration. Unlike the Incan cities in Peru and the Aztecs in Mexico (long ago uncovered by the Spanish), most of the ancient Mayan settlements had been left untouched and forgotten. As monuments were rediscovered, questions about their origins surfaced along with them. Pre-Columbian ruins in Mexico mystifed antiquarians, who were incredulous that such impressive societies could have developed independently from those that had simultaneously risen in the Old World. In response, theorists began to suggest potential Western origins for these forgotten ancient peoples (such as that the ancient Mexican civilizations were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel). The lineage of ancient Mesoamericans became a particularly signifcant topic in nineteenth-century America, as the United States sought to extricate itself from its European ties. Distinctive, indigenous origins for the Mayan people allowed for the formation of a Western hemispheric identity separate from Europe. Early explorers such as John Lloyd Stephens and his artist-companion Frederick Catherwood thus embarked upon their expeditions determined to scientifcally prove the indigeneity of the Mayan ruins. Others, however, like Benjamin Moore Norman, merely sought to capitalize on the vogue for newly discovered Mesoamerican ruins by publishing their travel accounts.

alice j. walkiewicz

Frederick Catherwood (1799–1854), United Kingdom. Gateway, Casa del Gobernador, Uxmal, plate 10 from Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America: Chiapas and Yucatan, 1844, hand-colored lithograph, 52.7 × 35.6 cm (20 O × 14 inches)

Thomas Bangs Thorpe

Thomas Bangs Thorpe is best known as an antebellum humorist and author of the short story “The Big Bear of Arkansas” (1841), but he devoted equal time to the visual arts. After training with the genre painter John Quidor, Thorpe worked as a portraitist in New York until he enrolled in Wesleyan University in 1834. When ill health prevented him from completing his degree, and dreams of European travel proved fnancially impossible, he moved to Louisiana in 1836, where for the next twenty-eight years he earned his living through a combination of humor writing, journalism, and painting, including portraits, animal paintings, landscapes, and genre scenes.1

In 1843, Thorpe created two small paintings, The Pyramid at Uxmal and The Temple at Chichén-Itzá, after engravings published in the travel narrative of little-known American artist-explorer Benjamin Moore Norman’s expedition around the Yucatan peninsula, entitled Ramblings in Yucatan; Or Notes of Travel Through the Peninsula, Including a Visit to the . . . Ruins of Chi-Chen, Kabah, Zayi, and Uxmal (frst published in 1843).2 Norman’s trip was inspired by the success of John Lloyd Stephens’s 1841 publication, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan 3 Norman sought to take advantage of the vogue for Mesoamerica that Stephens had created, visiting sites that his colleague had left unexplored. Norman thus managed to preempt Stephens’s second account of the Yucatan (Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, published just months after Norman’s book in 1843), and made a name for himself by revealing unknown ancient Mayan cities to the American public.4

A huge success in the United States, Norman’s book went through fve editions between 1842 and 1849.5 Mexican scholars, however, condemned it for inaccuracies in both content and imagery. The writer Justo Sierra O’Reilly called Norman’s account “the most ridiculous and foolish book [I] have read lately,” while the historian Gustavo Martínez Alomía ridiculed his illustrations for “represent[ing] imaginary objects.”6 But Norman’s goal was not to provide scientifcally accurate accounts of the Mayan ruins—it was to capitalize on their popularity in the United States. His narrative therefore emphasizes the exotic novelty of the sites, which he describes as “objects of interest and curiosity.”7 His romantic fantasy of the Yucatan ruins was intended to aid the sale of his narrative.

Thorpe’s paintings of The Pyramid at Uxmal and The Temple at Chichén-Itzá refect the fantastic nature of Norman’s publication. Living in New Orleans at the time (which was also Norman’s home from

The Temple at Chichén-Itzá, 1843

The Pyramid at Uxmal, 1843

1837 to 1860), and supporting his family solely through the income he made selling paintings, Thorpe was likely commissioned by Norman or one of his admirers to make these pictures, which faithfully reproduce Norman’s engravings.8 Copying scenes that he had never witnessed himself, however, Thorpe follows Norman’s essentializing tendency and strips the scenes down even further. Omitting the few specifcities of crumbling stone and individual plants, he provides a general impression of the scene: a pyramid buried beneath a sea of verdant vegetation or the ruins of a uniformly constructed stone structure. Most important, both the engravings and Thorpe’s paintings promulgate Norman’s assertion that he discovered these sites by emphasizing the overgrown vegetation. Like the engraving “The Pyramid, Chi Chen Ruins” in Norman’s publication, Thorpe’s oil reproduction, The Pyramid at Uxmal (1843), depicts the structure almost completely covered by jungle plants, so that only the approximate contour of the monument refects its pyramidal shape.

Thorpe, however, makes one signifcant deviation from Norman in his images: he alters the stafage in his scenes, making them appear less distinctively Western. This alteration is most clearly visible in The Temple at Chichén-Itzá, in which Thorpe replaces Norman’s fgure of a man wearing a Western coat and tool belt surveying the terrain—likely intended as a depiction of the author himself—with two indistinct fgures wearing white smocks, reddish-brown pants, and straw hats. In this way he suggests the presence of the indigenous people and their possible role in creating these structures, thereby reasserting Norman’s depiction of the Yucatan ruins as curiosities for the Western viewer to consume.

alice j. walkiewicz

1 Thorpe worked for both local publications in Louisiana and national journals such as Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. For more information about Thorpe’s biography, see David C. Estes, “Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1 March 1815 – 20 September 1878),” Antebellum Writers in the South: Second Series. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 248 (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 2001), 378-385; Mark A. Keller, “Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1 March 1815 – 20 September 1878), ” American Humorists, 1800–1950. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 11 (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1982), 497–505; Milton Rickels, Thomas Bangs Thorpe: Humorist of the Old Southwest (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1962).

2 Norman traveled to the Yucatan between December 1841 and March 1842. Benjamin Moore Norman, Rambles in Yucatan; Or Notes of Travel Through the Peninsula, Including a Visit to the . . . Ruins of Chi-Chen, Kabah, Zayi and Uxmal. Second Edition. (1843; repr., London: British Library, Historical Print Editions, 2011).

3 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, vol. 1 (1841; repr., New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969).

4 Norman registered his Rambles in Yucatan with the United States Congress for copyright protection in 1842, while Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatan was registered for copyright protection in 1843. The two travel accounts discuss many of the same Mesoamerican sites

5 The success of his frst book inspired Norman to publish a second book in 1845: B. M. Norman, Rambles by Land and Water or Notes of Travel in Cuba and Mexico (New York: Paine & Burgess; New Orleans: B. M. Norman, 1845).

6 Juan Duch, Yucantán en el Tiempo, Enciclopedia Alfabetica, vol. IV (Mérida, Yucatán, México: Inversiones Cares, 1998), 363.

7 Norman, Rambles in Yucatan, 3.

8 According to Thorpe’s biographer, Milton Rickels, the artist lived in New Orleans until June 1843. Rickels, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, 70.

Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1815–1878), United States

The Temple at Chichén-Itzá, 1843 Oil on canvas, 54.6 × 68.6 cm (21 K × 27 inches)

Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1815–1878), United States

The Pyramid at Uxmal, 1843 Oil on canvas, 54.6 × 68.6 cm (21 K × 27 inches)

Frederick Catherwood

Between 1839 and 1842, the American diplomat-explorer John Lloyd Stephens (1805–1852) and the English architect-artist Frederick Catherwood (1799–1854) made two trips to Mexico and Central America. The pair sought to uncover the ruins of the lost civilization of the Maya, relatively unknown in the Western world. After each trip, they published their fndings in multivolume works, titled Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843). Additionally in 1844, Catherwood independently published a collection of twenty-fve color lithographs derived from his travels with Stephens, titled Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. The pair’s travel accounts were wildly popular in the United States, and made Stephens and Catherwood the foremost authorities on Mayan culture for the next ffty years.1 Partly through Stephens’s insightful observations and deductions about the ruined cities and partly through Catherwood’s accurate transcription, their work has been credited with dispelling popular origin myths created during the nineteenth century that linked the Mayan culture to genesis in the Old World.

Discussions of Catherwood’s drawings have focused on their technical accuracy, which borders on scientifc precision. In his reproductions of the ruins, Catherwood sought to depict only that which was actually observable. During both of his excursions to Mesoamerica, the artist utilized a camera lucida to assist him with creating a more faithful facsimile of the monuments, and, on their second trip to Yucatan, he also brought a daguerreotype camera with him, to aid in the conversion of feld sketches to engravings for publication after their return to the United States.2 In a period before the development of the means to print photographs in books, Catherwood’s hyperattention to detail was crucial to their goal of emphasizing the unique qualities that they believed marked the Mayan ruins as distinctive from Old World traditions.

Catherwood’s precision, however, is only one part of the visual vocabulary of the artist’s Mesoamerican production.3 While his published images were intended to serve as archaeological evidence of excavated sites, his watercolors belong to the romantic landscape tradition. Produced during his frst trip to the region in 1839–40, the watercolor sketch Landscape with a Mayan Ruin, Mexico depicts the ruined city of Utatlán, the site of the most powerful and luxurious Mayan city at the time of the Spanish incursion in the sixteenth century. Stephens found the sight of the ruined city to be awe inspiring.4 Catherwood likewise conveys the grandeur of Utatlán in his water-

Landscape with a Mayan Ruin, Mexico, c. 1839–40

Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America: Chiapas and Yucatan, 1844

color overlooking the great ravine that surrounds the ruined city and had protected the living city from invaders. The city almost melts into the surrounding landscape of Catherwood’s sketch. Were it not for the lighter, golden color of the ruined stone, the remains of Utatlán might be confused for another mountain in the range that looms in the background. To further enhance our amazement at the remains of this great city, Catherwood has also included ominous storm clouds rolling in at left and the small foreground fgures of the expedition party to establish scale. In the watercolor sketch Catherwood refects an interest in the emotional efect of the Mayan sites, in contrast to the insistence on scientifc exactitude in the line drawings that appeared in Incidents of Travel. The earlier drawings are devoid of emotion, so that the published image of Utatlán is an objective line drawing of the contours of the ruins as well as a plan of the ruined city and fortress. Over time, however, Catherwood introduced the sentimentality of the pastoral and sublime landscape traditions, so that, in his 1844 Views of Ancient Monuments, his lithographs of Mayan ruins are more blatantly infused with emotion.

alice j. walkiewicz

1 The frst narrative alone sold nearly 20,000 copies and went through twelve editions in the frst three months of publication. See R. Tripp Evans, Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820–1915 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 70; Fabio Bourbon, The Lost Cities of the Mayas: The Life, Art, and Discoveries of Frederick Catherwood (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1999), 37.

2 Stephens documents Catherwood’s utilization of the device, and argues that, because of the artist’s use of this instrument, he was able to create a more truthful image, free from the type of artistic licensure that characterized earlier representations of the Mayan ruins. John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, vol. 1 (1841; repr., New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969), 137; Evans, Romancing the Maya, 53, 106; Merideth Paxton, “Frederick Catherwood and the Maya,” in The Maya Image in the Western World: A Catalog to an Exhibition at the University of New Mexico, ed. Peter Briggs (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1986), 18.

3 The combination of the documentary and the aesthetic in Catherwood’s works has also been noted by scholars R. Tripp Evans, Katherine Manthorne, Anne Miller, and Earnest Portia.

4 Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, vol. 2, 177–178, 183.

Frederick Catherwood (1799–1854), United Kingdom

Landscape with a Mayan Ruin, Mexico, c. 1839–40

Watercolor on paper, 19.9 × 30.4 cm (7 Y × 12 inches)

Frederick Catherwood (1799–1854), United Kingdom

Well of Bolonchen, plate 20, from Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America: Chiapas and Yucatan, 1844

Hand-colored lithograph, 52.7 × 35.6 cm (20 O × 14 inches)

and Yucatan, 1844

Hand-colored lithographs, each 52.7 × 35.6 cm (20 O × 14 inches)

Frederick Catherwood (1799–1854), United Kingdom Gateway at Labnah, plate 19 and Castle at Tuloom, plate 23, from Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America: Chiapas

FIGURES IN THE LANDSCAPE

Surveying Latin American landscape art, we frst note the major compositional features: mountains and other rock formations, tall trees of varied species, waterfalls, fora and fauna. The artists were careful to observe and insert these natural elements that were distinctive to this region of the world. But if we look more closely, we spy fgures, often small in scale, engaged in various activities. These have traditionally been dismissed as mere accessories or staf age, a term borrowed from the French to connote humans or animals added as subordinate features of a landscape painting. Pondering these elements further, we realize that while miniaturized they are individualized to reinforce the meaning of the picture. In Frederic Church’s Cotopaxi (see p. 147) we might imagine the man in the red serape to represent Church’s newfound Ecuadorian colleague, Rafael Salas, soon to become a leader in his national school of landscape art. Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s pictures of Yucatan (see pp. 186 and 187) include natives observing the ruins, and the artist sketching. In his Valley of Mexico (see p. 63) Conrad Wise Chapman inserts a genre scene to show the local customs.

In the work of traveler artists, the motif of fgures on the road possesses a history and an importance of its own. When the artist journeyed far from home to sketch a particular landmark, he wanted to underscore the difculties of travel and his success at overcoming them. Ernest Charton’s The Road from Valparaíso to Santiago (see p. 203) demonstrates this approach. Here the road from the Chilean coast leading into the Andean highlands dominates the center of the composition, perched at a precipitous height with its sharp zig-zag path back and forth. The travelers in the foreground are preparing for their expedition, and awaiting us to join them. Anton Goering’s The Cordillera, Venezuela, with Travelers on a Road (see p. 155) similarly shows a group of men and their mounts, but in this case they have come to the edge of a precipice and survey the mountain panorama spread out before them. The road in these and other scenes provides a path through the space as well as an invitation to follow the artist metaphorically into that terrain, experiencing vicariously the botanical specimens and sights along the way. Traveling overland, explorers adopted many means of travel: on horseback, by mule train, or on foot. At times, however, the most expeditious means was by boat. William John Burchell, in his rendering of Brazil near Santos (see p. 205), reminds us that often travelers relied on local natives to guide them through local waters. Here we see an Afro-Brazilian man navigating a small river craft to get his passenger to his destination.

These fgures are emblematic of mobility, of physical movement across Latin America. But even the most energetic traveler must pause to rest, get his bearings, and admire the scenery. To express this, artists sometimes depicted a stationary man or woman positioned looking out onto the scene, in the manner of the Ruckenfigur of German Romantic painting. Observing him or her from behind, we are encouraged to share the experience and vicariously contemplate the scene of sublime nature. In Eduard Hildebrandt’s painting of Rio de Janeiro (see p. 199) two fgures stand on a spit of terra frma in the foreground and gaze over the calm waters of Rio’s harbor and the mountains beyond. Bathed in golden light they—and by extension we, the viewers—feel that they have arrived at a natural paradise. The fgures on the road, then, play a variety of diverse functions: visual, psychological, and biographical. They reinforce the fact that the painter left his studio, traveled long distances, and explored these regions frst hand. They are testimony to the complex aesthetic, social, and cultural roles played by the traveler artist.

katherine manthorne

Detail of Ernest Charton de Treville’s The Road from Valparaíso to Santiago; see page 203.

Martin Johnson Heade

Martin Johnson Heade became interested in landscape painting while living in New York in the 1850s. There he came into contact with landscape painters including Frederic Edwin Church, whose works he admired and with whom he established a friendship. Most likely inspired by Church’s The Heart of the Andes (1859), Heade frst visited Brazil during the latter half of 1863 through March 1864.1 He traveled twice more to Central and South America, visiting Nicaragua in 1866 and traveling through Colombia, Panama, and Jamaica in 1870. Heade’s travel was also probably stimulated by a guidebook authored by the Reverend James Cooley Fletcher, a member of the US Legation in Rio de Janeiro, and the theologian Daniel Parish Kidder, who had described the vast variety of hummingbirds—the “little winged gem[s],” in Brazil.2

Although his illustrated book on hummingbirds was never published, in Brazil between 1863 and 1864 Heade produced over forty hummingbird paintings and some twenty landscapes of the bay of Rio de Janeiro. Heade, who was awarded a medal by Brazil’s Emperor Dom Pedro II, wrote in his Brazil-London Journal (1863) that “ . . . the Emperor told me I should take a sketch of the city. The view is certainly one of the most beautiful that I remember ever to have seen . . . there is nothing to intercept the view in any direction and the panorama is glorious.”3

Heade produced Sunset: A Scene in Brazil during this period, one of the twenty paintings that, as he wrote in his journal, were intended “for an American public fascinated with exotic scenes from its own hemisphere.”4 Sunset was typical of the landscapes he produced during this period: small and intense vistas, they were warmly colored, intimate, and enclosed. They were, as the art historian John Wilmerding has described them, “visions of wild tropical light, dense jungle and exploding meteorological drama.”5 Heade found Rio de Janeiro to be “as cool as Newport in the summer,” also recording that, “The surf rolling lazily up in the sand makes a refreshing sort of music for us that I had not brought within my calculations of a tropic life.”6

In Sunset: A Scene in Brazil, we see a view of a village across a small body of water, presumably a pond. We also see a hill, a farm, several other buildings, and their inhabitants. The palm trees and the tropical fora in the foreground are native to Brazil. The red sunset is dramatic, and the sky is richly colored. The rose-colored cumulus clouds seem to protrude from the canvas and blend into the ochre hues of the sunset. The light has an emotional quality and the clouds suggest a claw-like

tension. Although the painting evokes theories of the sublime through the contrast of the light and clouds, the canvas’s smaller size contradicts the traditional conventions of the sublime.7 The poetic atmosphere and lighting of the painting demonstrates Heade’s ties to the Luminists, even though it difers from Luminist painting in its less profound perspective, which, along with the painting’s horizontal format, gives the landscape a planar organization.8

The dark landscape of the foreground contrasts with the bright cloudy atmosphere of the background. The overall handling is tight, and the pigment seems to bleed into the heavens. Although we can infer that the scene is set in Brazil, the title Sunset: A Scene in Brazil does not reveal the precise setting of this work. Heade chose to set the painting in the countryside around Rio de Janeiro, depicting a rural scene with picturesque cottages and a thatched roof in the distance rather than showing us the city of Rio de Janeiro.

The fgures are important in this scene for three primary reasons. The insertion of distant Brazilian fgures with a donkey cart transforms the tropical environment into a fusion of landscape painting and genre study. In addition, we know that Heade was an opponent of slavery, suggesting that his depiction of a farm owned by free blacks alludes to his abolitionist stance.9 Last, the fgures contribute to the painting’s composition. They act as a visual aid that leads the viewer’s eye down the dirt road, through the rural village, to the serpentine hills, and to the shimmering sunset.

Sunset: A Scene in Brazil exemplifes Heade’s ability to capture nature’s remote and feeting beauty.10 With his deep understanding of the mechanics of nature, spatial structure, and the ephemeral efects of light, Heade transformed relatively prosaic landscapes into visually heightened felds of subtly shifting perceptions.

Sunset: A Scene in Brazil, 1864–65

alex c. maccaro

Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904), United States Sunset: A Scene in Brazil, 1864–65 Oil on canvas, 48.9 × 86.4 cm (19 N × 34 inches)

1 Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 84–94.

2 During his frst excursion to South America, Heade intended to illustrate a complete series of American hummingbirds in a book that was to be published in London under the title The Gems of Brazil. Heade had to paint the South American hummingbirds from frsthand observation because only one species is found in the United States east of the Mississippi River. See Robert George McIntyre, Martin Johnson Heade, 1819–1904 (New York: Pantheon Press, 1948), 11.

3 Martin Johnson Heade, Brazil-London Journal (1863), 29. Heade also wrote about his travels to Brazil: “A few years after my frst appearance in this breathing world I was attracted by the all-absorbing hummingbird craze, and it has never left me since, with the natural result that what is known about them I know, and what I don’t know about them others do—or think they do. There is probably no member of the feathered tribe . . . that has been so thoroughly written up . . . and probably not one that has been honored by so much nonsense.” See McIntyre, Martin Johnson Heade, 10–11.

4 Janet Comey, “Tropical Landscapes,” in Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Martin Johnson Heade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 51.

5 John Wilmerding, American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875 (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 116.

6 Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 66–7.

7 On American landscape and the theme of the sublime as introduced by Edmund Burke, see Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

8 On Luminism, see Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 28–29 and 231–38.

9 Stebbins, The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné, 66.

10 John K. Howat, American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), 163.

A South American

Eduard Hildebrandt

Two tropical sunsets by the German landscape artist Eduard Hildebrandt, A South American Landscape with Storks by a Lake at Sunset and Sunset over Pedra da Gávea, Rio de Janeiro, show fantastic, exotic scenes created from the imagination and memory of the artist. When Hildebrandt traveled to Brazil in 1844, he was already an accomplished landscape painter, having studied with William Krause in Berlin and Eugène Isabey in Paris. In 1843, he met Alexander von Humboldt, who used his respected position within the upper echelons of European society to secure Hildebrandt patronage from Frederick William IV of Prussia. Although both A South American Landscape with Storks by a Lake at Sunset and Sunset over Pedra da Gávea, Rio de Janeiro were executed in Hildebrandt’s German studio many years after his trip, the artist’s startling depiction of the light in Brazil still captivated the German art world’s attention. As one reviewer wrote in 1866: “Hildebrandt has given us oil paintings of two sunsets, which were especially admired—one, on the shores of the Ganges swims in a golden light: the other, an evening in the tropics, shines in a red glow. The artist produces such remarkable efects of light that not only can no one else vie with him, but he even excels his own former works of this sort.”1

Posthumously, Hildebrandt’s Brazilian scenes declined in repute. Works from his later travels, particularly those of Asia and the Middle East, were held in much greater esteem whereas those of his Brazilian voyage were nearly forgotten until 1937 when they were again championed by Ambassador Joaquim de Sousa Leão, the Brazilian Ambassador to Germany and an amateur art historian. He described Hildebrandt’s on-site sketches as “vibrat[ing] with light as those of Turner, who evidently inspired him.”2 However, Sousa Leão did not value Hildebrandt’s later works, executed in the studio, such as A South American Landscape or Sunset over Pedra da Gávea, as much as he did his sketches. Refuting Humboldt’s praise, Sousa Leão argued that Hildebrandt’s oil paintings were “of much less value, as they lack substance and are too fuid . . .” and show a “ . . . degenera[tion] into theatrical romanticism.”3 Sousa Leão’s praise of Hildebrandt’s sketches over his painting reveals his preference for the scientifc realism they displayed. However, his argument that the detailed veracity of the sketches from Hildebrandt’s direct observation are worth more than the artist’s recollections, impressions, and impassioned visual descriptions begs reconsideration. The temporal and geographic distance that Hildebrandt achieved in his studio in Germany, years after his Brazil-

ian voyage, allowed a condensation, synthesis, and intensifcation of memories that brought to bear the artist’s own agency and subjective vision.

In Sunset over Pedra da Gávea, colossal rocks that fank the scene dwarf two ambiguous fgures at the water’s edge. The rocks, said to be inscribed with ancient pictographs, symbolized tales of lost ancient knowledge and pre-Columbian mysticism. While the work may not be an accurate geographical study of the hills around Pedra da Gávea, it is based on an 1844 watercolor by Hildebrandt, suggesting that the artist used the sketches and watercolors he made in Brazil as mnemonic devices for later works.4 Hildebrandt’s use of light, so praised by Humboldt, captures the mythical sense of the rocks of the Tijuca forests outside of Rio de Janeiro, and of Pedra da Gávea in particular.

Another 1844 watercolor appears to be the basis for A South American Landscape 5 Hildebrandt retained much of the watercolor’s format, subtly shifting certain elements such as the movement of trees and the lake grasses. In the painting, Hildebrandt adopts deeper, more vibrant colors, which contrast the trees, palms, bushes, and rocks that fank the shoreline with the warm glow of the setting sun, suggesting that with the passage of time, the intensity of his aesthetic experience of the Brazilian landscape grew bolder and more vivid.

In creating these works, Hildebrandt eschewed the role of the artist as a maker of accurate, scientifc records in favor of that of a master storyteller who evokes a visceral experience that extends into the memory of a past and distant personal history.

agnieszka anna ficek

1 “Correspondence from Berlin,” Zeitschrift fur bildende kunst, 1866, quoted in Alicia Eve Lubowski, “The Picture of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt and the Tropical American Landscape” (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2009), 394.

2 Joaquim de Sousa Leão, The Landscape Painter, Eduard Hildebrandt (Revista de Semana, 1937) quoted in Gilberto Ferrez, The Brazil of Eduard Hildebrandt (Rio de Janeiro: Distribuidora Record de Serviços de Imprensa, 1989), 8.

3 Ibid., 8–9.

4 Landscape in the High Mountains, La Gávea, Brazil, currently part of the collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

5 Rio de Janeiro at Sunset, 1844, currently part of the collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Landscape with Storks by a Lake at Sunset, c. 1850 Sunset over Pedra da Gávea, Rio de Janeiro, c. 1860

Eduard Hildebrandt (1818–1869), Germany

A South American Landscape with Storks by a Lake at Sunset, c. 1850 Oil on canvas, 33.7 × 43.2 (13 N × 17 inches)

Eduard Hildebrandt (1818–1869), Germany

Sunset over Pedra da Gávea, Rio de Janeiro, c. 1860 Oil on canvas, 52.1 × 67.3 cm (20 K × 26 K inches)

Norton Bush

Norton Bush traveled to Latin America in 1853, passing through Nicaragua on his way to San Francisco from New York. This was his frst of three excursions to the region. The second was in 1868, when he was commissioned by San Francisco fnancier William C. Ralston to paint his business interests in Panama, and the third trip occurred in 1875. Although Bush was no doubt inspired by Frederic Edwin Church’s famous paintings of South America, his travel there was also necessitated by logistics. The Transcontinental Railroad was not completed until 1869, so in order to complete the long trek between San Francisco and New York before that date, Bush had to travel through Central America.

On the San Juan depicts a view of the San Juan River in Nicaragua, familiar to Bush through his travels. The work shows recurring themes in Bush’s tropical paintings, such as palm trees dripping with tangled vines and a smooth body of water refecting a sunset. The detail is meticulously rendered, with delicate brushwork, a spare composition, and a crystalline light that envelops the scene. The sunlight’s amber coloration saturates the hazy sky, the mountains, and the cool, calm river. The discrete aspects of the painting’s composition—from the tiny islands on the river to the bountiful fora on the bottom-left corner of the canvas to the small fgures—are all painted in precise detail.

On the San Juan is typical of Bush’s tropical scenes of the 1860s and early 1870s that he rendered in the Luminist style.1 He conveyed the abundance of tropical fora, the heaviness of the dense atmosphere, and the stillness of the waters. Bush’s painting is, according to Gabriela Rangel, “evocative rather than purely descriptive.”2 On the San Juan evokes the quiet mood of a secluded river in the tropics. Bush has captured the suspension of light and color in the atmosphere of the sunset, whose soft harmonies refect beautifully onto the quiet river.

While On the San Juan does display Luminist qualities such as a calm, refective body of water, cool and clear colors, and a soft, hazy sky that occupies nearly half of the composition, it difers from typical East Coast Luminism in that it depicts tropical fora, presents a narrower perspective, and portrays a scene of tranquility rather than the intensity of a storied locale. In addition, the topography is less dramatic than that of typical Luminist scenes. In this painting, Bush depicts a quiet sunset characterized by tropical warmth and stillness. Instead of heralding turbulent weather, the misty scene seems to promise unchanging humidity.

Before the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, a majority of those who settled in San Francisco had, like Bush, experienced

On the San Juan, 1871

a taste of the tropics while on their journey to California, and Bush’s paintings of the lush beauty of the region evoked in them nostalgic memories of those scenes. With patrons who were enthusiastic about his luminous and colorful works, Bush was assured of a market in California. An art critic of the period concluded that in California, he had “the remunerative patronage for which he would struggle perhaps vainly here [on the East Coast of the United States].”3

Bush’s works enjoyed critical success. It is unclear whether On the San Juan was exhibited at the 1871 National Academy of Design exhibition. However, a similar painting by Bush of Lake Nicaragua was shown at that year ’s exhibition, prompting a critic to write that Bush painted his scenes “with great tenderness and beauty.”4 In 1874, a critic wrote in the San Francisco Evening Post: “Not only is the vegetation splendidly tinted, but the atmosphere is warm, soft and golden, and the water is perfectly represented as can be imagined.”5 The following year, another noted “ . . . in painting nature, while paying attention to the faithfulness of detail, Mr. Bush introduces touches which poetize . . . and throw a dreamy beauty over the scene. . . . Sky and atmosphere are rendered soft and the background objects are so faintly indistinct as to allow scope to the fancy to wander. . . .”6 Critics as well as patrons viewed Bush’s tropical river scenes favorably and admired his attention to detail, light, and atmosphere.

alex c. maccaro

1 Although the term Luminism is problematic for some art historians, it generally refers to the bleeding efects of light in landscape through the use of aerial perspective, attention to detail and concealment of visual brushstrokes. See J. Gray Sweeney, “Inventing Luminism: ‘Labels Are the Dickens,’” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 2 (2003), 93. See also Alan Wallach, “Rethinking ‘Luminism’: Taste, Class, and Aestheticizing Tendencies in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting,” in Nancy Siegel ed., The Cultured Canvas: New Perspectives on American Landscape Painting (Dartmouth: University of New England Press, 2011), 115–147.

2 Although Rangel was referring to a diferent tropical scene by Bush (A Memory of the Tropics, 1874) in her catalogue, this observation could apply to many of Bush’s Central and South American paintings of the 1860s and early 1870s. See Gabriela Rangel et al., Unity of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas (Berlin: Kerber Verlag, 2014), 48.

3 Quoted in Dwight Miller, California Landscape Painting, 1860–1885: Artists Around Keith and Hill (Stanford, CA: Stanford Art Gallery, 1975), 19.

4 Ibid., 20.

5 San Francisco Evening Post, October 27, 1874.

6 Quoted in Marjorie Arkelian et al., Tropical: Tropical Scenes by the 19th-Century Painters of California (Oakland, CA: Oakland Museum, 1971), 29.

Norton Bush (1834–1894), United States On the San Juan, 1871

Oil on canvas, 50.8 × 91.5 cm (20 × 36 inches)

Ernest Charton de Treville

“Like the ocean, the Steppe flls the mind with a feeling of infnity; and thought, escaping from the visible impressions of space, rises to contemplations of a higher order,”1 Alexander von Humboldt wrote in his 1808 account of the South American landscape, Aspects of Nature Along with the lofty Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, his writings impelled subsequent generations of European and North American artists to South America in search of unprecedented landscape motifs and an expanded worldview. The tremendous impact of the Prussian scientist is evident in the manifold views of South America created by others in his wake.

Ernest Charton de Treville (1816–1877) belonged to the same generation as Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), and both French artists rooted their art practice in the study of landscape. They came of age in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the period that radically reconsidered the genre of landscape. Following in the footsteps of the Prussian explorer changed the course of Charton’s life. He arrived in Chile in 1843 with his family, and spent much of his life depicting the Chilean landscape, a rich contrast to his native France. Here Charton delights in his mastery of this far-fung view, depicting a variety of fora, social types, and topography with remarkable verve.

Charton’s The Road from Valparaíso to Santiago ofers an expansive view of the valley between the two cities, one side ridged by the Andes, the other by the hills from which we see the scene. The audience and, presumably, the artist, looks out toward the Andes from the top of a small hill. In the foreground, a Chilean gaucho struggles with a stubborn horse, while grazing cattle look on. Charton’s picturesque strategy of framing his landscape with a dark foreground of thick foliage introduces stacked recession into the background from hillock to thicket, valley to mountains in the distance. Winding through this scene is a ribbon-like dirt road, tracing the undulating shapes of the hills in dusty sand. This road takes a straight course through the Valle Central toward Santiago. The stafage of Charton’s scene appear to range in class and profession, from the horse-driven passenger coaches of the high bourgeoisie to the rugged gauchos and farmers of the arid valley below. While some struggle on horseback to hurry down the hillside, others take rest on the road, admiring the rugged topography, perhaps waiting for a repair. These diverse travelers refect the changing nature of the region in this very period: spanning the two major metropolitan centers of Chile, this road represents the inevitable modernization of the landscape through travel and communication.

The Road from Valparaíso to Santiago, 1849

The gaucho’s struggle in the foreground is one of many anecdotal details that lead us along the road, through the foothills, toward the white range of the Andes on the horizon. Charton organized his landscape through a series of implicit contrasts: city and country, man and nature, hill and valley, the thick vegetation of the steppes and the snowcovered Andes on the horizon. Unlike Frederic Edwin Church, whose scenes of the Andes balanced topographical variety with sublime monumentality, Charton focuses on the human experience of moving through this landscape.

The period spanning Humboldt’s promotion of the South American landscape and Charton’s arrival was marked by upheaval and fux in the Americas: in ffty years, Hidalgo and Morelos resisted Spanish rule in Mexico, while Chile and Argentina were liberated by José de San Martín. In European art, the Romantic movement of the previous generation made way for a Realist study of the land and its people. While previous European artists often condensed their depictions of South America to studies of the banditti of the countryside, Charton saw this inevitability as a microcosm of a much more expansive set of contrasts. Humboldt’s explorations, voluminous publication, and aesthetic philosophy left an indelible mark on those who followed in his footsteps. As the century progressed, however, the South American landscape became a site of social interaction. These had become the focus of the Bavarian artist Johann Moritz Rugendas in his depictions of this same valley a decade before Charton’s. Through ofering an accurate topographical account of Chile’s central valley, Rugendas’s scenes also focused on the interaction between social classes that occurs upon this road, combining costumbrista motifs with the Romantic landscape. Charton includes these diferent types, yet minimizes them, favoring instead a totalizing view of the landscape more in line with Humboldt. Rugendas treats this very same valley and road as a backdrop for his foreground scene. Charton ofers his view from atop one of the steppes, including the social, human element as an essential component of the South American cosmos that so captivated Humboldt.

theodore barrow

1 Alexander von Humboldt, Aspects of Nature in Diferent Lands and Diferent Climates (1808), trans. Elizabeth Sabine (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1850), 26.

Ernest Charton de Treville (1815–1877), France

The Road from Valparaíso to Santiago, 1849

Oil on canvas, 56.3 × 87.5 cm (22 V × 34 K inches)

William John Burchell

William John Burchell was a British adventurer, naturalist, botanist, artist, and author who traveled extensively throughout his career, embarking on his frst expedition to the interior of South Africa in 1810.1 After returning to England and publishing the journals from his expedition in the Cape, Burchell was asked to join the 1825 diplomatic envoy to Portugal and Brazil led by Sir Charles Stuart. The envoy’s purpose was to negotiate England’s recognition of Brazilian independence from Portugal and to assist in Brazil’s process of abolishing slavery.2 The drawings and paintings Burchell executed in Brazil were never published, but many of his travel sketches survive in Johannesburg’s Museum Africa (formerly the Africana Museum).3 Burchell’s painting On the River, Near Santos, Brazil, and many of his surviving sketches, combined both his scientifc interests and his political positioning visà-vis slavery in Brazil in a Romantic, picturesque package.

On the River, Near Santos, Brazil was created fve years after Burchell returned from Brazil in 1830, while he was working in his London studio. We can infer that Burchell based this work on studies he made of a river near Santos, a maritime port located on the Atlantic coast in the state of São Paulo, as the preliminary sketch of the work survives in the Museum Africa.4 From the sketch, we can see Burchell added several picturesque elements, such as the obscured misty jungle beyond the fgures, and the Cyathea candelabrum palm to the left of the composition, which aids in framing the scene.5 Many of the painting’s attributes suggest that he also wanted to convey the Romantic aspects of the scene. Burchell created an interesting tension between the hazy, blurred background and the carefully detailed fora on the bottom left and right of the canvas, which recalls his training in botany. The verticality of the oarsman’s body is echoed in the tall palms, which Burchell identifed as Guaridova palms. These palms enter on the left and then lead us back and around, creating a sense of the deep, circular space of the river and framing the boat and fgures, which are enclosed by the mountainous terrain.6 A majority of the composition is blurred by a misty serenity that recalls J. M. W. Turner’s Romantic style, which uses light to obfuscate some elements and clarify others. We can see Burchell manipulating the light in a Turneresque manner in the clarifcation of the fora and the fgures and the obscured wilderness in the background.

The two Afro-Brazilian fgures in the boat center the painting. One sits while the other, standing, controls the small vessel as it moves down the tranquil river. The peaceful bodies of the two fgures echo Burchell’s political stance against slavery and his respect for native

populations. He takes care to depict the men’s bodies in a graceful manner—the oarsman glances down at his refection in the still water while skillfully moving the oar without creating a disturbance in the water, while the seated fgure has his back toward us, watching the passing wilderness fall behind them. Both fgures are unaware of the observer or the colonial presence in their landscape as they glide down the river undisturbed. Burchell’s portrayal of the men in a private moment signals his compassion for them. Instead of depicting AfroBrazilian bodies as colonial subjects laboring in the feld as slaves, Burchell permits the viewer to see the fgures in an idealized state, appealing to the romanticized notions of the creation of a national, heroic Brazilian identity. He makes his disdain toward the institution of slavery visible by painting the heroic, free Afro-Brazilian men at peace with nature. I would argue that Burchell’s depictions of these fgures and landscape is aligned with his political leanings, and refects his choice to travel to Brazil with Sir Charles Stuart in order to initiate the nation’s abolition of slavery.

1 William Beinart, “Men, Science, Travel and Nature in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth-century Cape,” Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 4 (1998): 775–781.

2 Ana Maria Belluzzo, “The Traveller and the Brazilian Landscape,” Portuguese Studies 23, no. 1 (2007): 49.

3 R. F. Kennedy, Catalogue of Pictures in the Africana Museum (Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1971). VI, Supplement A–G, B2103–B2351: 103–129.

4 Ibid., 103–129

5 Ibid., 103–129

6 Ibid., 103–129.

On the River, Near Santos, Brazil, 1835

alana hernandez

William John Burchell (1782–1863), United Kingdom

On the River, Near Santos, Brazil, 1835 Oil on board, 29.2 × 34.6 cm (11 K × 13 X inches)

Nicolas- Ant oine Taunay

Nicolas-Antoine Taunay arrived in Brazil with his family in 1816 as a member of the French Artistic Mission of artists organized by Joachim Lebreton, a former arts minister of France. They were invited by the exiled Portuguese king, Dom João VI, who wanted to found an arts academy in Rio de Janeiro.1 Seeking nature, Taunay found his Arcadia in the Tijuca Forest near Rio, where he built a villa and small cofee plantation. While there, Taunay painted at least fve landscapes of the Tijuca Forest. His love of the place is evident in an undated selfportrait entitled Cascatinha Tijuca, in which two indigenous people observe him at his easel while cattle pass below.

View of the Road of Quebra Chángala in the Alto da Boa Vista is among the Tijuca landscape paintings. It depicts a serene view of receding mountains and a body of water from an overlook emerging from the woods. A pale blue sky flls the upper half of the canvas, lightening as the eye moves down the picture until it takes on shades of pink, with bands of barely visible horizontal clouds stretched across it. Taunay’s large Dutch-inspired sky meets a range of pale lavender mountains sloping gently down to a distant middle ground where a narrow river winds its way forward to the very center of the picture. At the horizon, hills closer to the foreground are fooded with early morning sunlight. Deciduous trees march up the slopes of these hills while a small lone palm tree situated in the valley at the very center of the horizon provides evidence of the tropical location. The foreground ofers the darkest colors; a tall tree frames the composition on the right, balanced on the left by shorter trees, one of which may be a banana plant. Another tropical-looking shrub grows just right of center. Two cows are spotlighted in the foreground, left of center, and are the sole living creatures in the painting.

Taunay was well known for his skill at portraying tiny fgures in genre scenes, and the absence of people in this painting is unusual. Another atypical feature is the painting’s size, which is signifcantly larger than most of his Brazilian landscapes. In Brazil, Taunay continued to paint in the neoclassical style and with the Romantic sensibility in which he had been trained.2 Taunay was already a mature artist when he came to Brazil at age sixty-one. As an art student in the 1770s, he participated in plein air sketching expeditions with his friends to the Parisian countryside. In the mid-1770s, on scholarship at the French Academy in Rome, he was exposed to the work of JacquesLouis David, and adopted the custom of flling landscapes of the Italian countryside with invented classical ruins and small fgures. His love of

the countryside inspired his work throughout his career. Returning to Paris, his work found critical acceptance and established his reputation, but during the Revolution, he prudently retired with his family to the countryside near Montmorency, about ffteen kilometers north of the city. There he lived in a former home of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom he had known.3

His reputation earned him an invitation to travel to Brazil. After the Revolution, when he returned to Paris as an appointee to the Institut de France (1795), his status grew through his membership in the circle of the Empress Josephine, who probably recommended him to accompany Napoleon during the latter’s 1805–06 German campaign.4 Even after the fall of Napoleon in 1814, a time when many artists who had been associated with the regime needed to fnd alternate ways to further their careers, Taunay’s renown led to his selection for Lebreton’s Mission in 1816 5

As professor of landscape painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, he had hoped to become its director. However, upon Lebreton’s death in 1819, Taunay was passed over in favor of a younger Brazilian artist and in 1821 he departed Brazil in bitter disappointment. Back in Paris, he continued to fnd success, exhibiting six of his eighteen extant Brazilian landscapes at the Salon of 1822.6 Although we do not know if View of the Road of Quebra Chángala in the Alto da Boa Vista was among them, his Brazilian paintings with their Neoclassically-derived depictions of the serenity, repose, and beauty of the Tijuca Forest clearly appealed to the taste for exotic Latin American landscapes that was developing at the time.7

View of the Road of Quebra Chángala in the Alto da Boa Vista, c. 1816–30

ellen glass birger

Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (1755–1830), France

View of the Road of Quebra Chángala in the Alto da Boa Vista, c. 1816–30 Oil on canvas, 71.8 × 106 cm (28 N × 41 O inches)

1 Júlio Bandeira, Pedro Martins Caldes Xexéo, and Roberto Condura, A Missao Francesa (Rio de Janeiro: Sextante Artes, 2003), 15.

2 Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural, s.v. “Taunay, Nicolas-Antoine,” http://enciclopedia. itaucultural.org.br/pessoa24452/nicolas-antoine-taunay.

3 Rafael Sagredo Baez, “An Empire in the Tropics: Historiographic Analysis,” trans. Cristina Labarca Cortés, Historia (Santiago: Instituto de la Pontifcia Catolica de Chile) 4, no. 1 (Jan.–Feb. 2008): 267–282.

4 Valerie Mainz, “Taunay, Nicolas-Antoine.” Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/ grove/art/T083476.

5 Baez, “An Empire in the Tropics,” 273.

6 Christie’s, London, “Exploration and Travel,” Sale 5667, lot 11, September 27, 1996.

7 Although elected to the Legion of Honor in 1824, Taunay fell into obscurity after his death in 1830. His reputation was revived in the 1870s by the Goncourt brothers, but there was no catalogue raisonné until 2003: Claudine Lebrun, Nicolas-Antoine Taunay 1755–1830, (Paris: Arthena, 2003). A study of his Brazilian oeuvre was published fve years later: Lilia Moritz Schwarcz and Elaine Diaz, Nicolas-Antoine Taunay no Brasil: Uma Leitura dos Trópicos (Rio de Janeiro: Sextante, 2008).

Ferdinand Bellermann

The sun rises majestically. Before us, like an imposing mass of clouds, lies the mountainous coast of Venezuela. A cool breeze carries us toward La Guaira. The clouds slowly transform into mountains, and fnally we can see the majestic mountains clearly before us . . . The clouds pass constantly over the mountain’s peaks, which look magnifcent under the shining light of the sun, there are plantations and villages spread out here and there, the ruddy earth looking especially beautiful against the lush green.1

With precise details of light and color, the young Prussian painter Ferdinand Bellermann described his arrival to the coast of Venezuela on July 10, 1842. He was invited to travel from Hamburg on the ship Margareth by Carl Rühs, a German merchant and the Prussian Consul in Puerto Cabello who was seeking a German landscape artist and artisans to work in Venezuela.

A few days before leaving, Bellermann met Alexander von Humboldt in Potsdam, who recommended including in his itinerary certain points of Venezuelan geography that he had seen on his travels between 1799 and 1800. Surely, Humboldt also conveyed to Bellermann his conviction that nature be depicted with scientifc rigor. Aware that the young artist, who had been trained in the Art School of Weimar and Academy of Arts in Berlin, possessed artistic strengths, an interest in nature, and a penchant for travel, Humboldt had appeared before King Frederick William IV of Prussia to ask for fnancial support for the journey. In exchange, Bellermann sent his Venezuelan work to Berlin’s Royal Museum, and today the Kupferstichkabinett of the State Museums of Berlin has 235 of his Venezuelan works.

Bellermann traveled throughout Venezuela for three years and four months, recorded in precise detail in the diary he kept, in addition to notebooks in which he compiled numerous notes about the Venezuelan landscape, fora, and fauna, as well as sketches of the local people.2

The Margareth docked in the port of La Guaira, Venezuela’s most important seaport, located in the north on the Caribbean Sea; from there, Bellermann sailed to Puerto Cabello, home to an active group of German merchants who received him very amicably and ofered him their assistance. Among them was Ludwig Glöckler, who invited him to visit his sugarcane plantation located in San Esteban, a town near Puerto Cabello. Bellermann visited San Esteban three times, and it became one of his favorite places in Venezuela, as noted in his diaries: “The time that I passed there was among the most beautiful times of

At the Sugar Mill, c. 1868–70

my life, and whatever once dominated all of the memories of my travels . . . now has a parallel.”3 It was here that he frst encountered the tropical jungle and became captivated by its intricate, varied, and exuberant vegetation. Bellermann’s fascination with the topic caused him to later become known in Germany as the “jungle painter.”

Throughout his journey, the artist executed innumerable in situ pencil drawings on diverse themes, among which his masterful botanical studies are remarkable, as well as small oil studies on canvas and cardboard. These sketches would serve as the basis for his execution, upon return to Germany, of larger oil paintings, many of which were commissioned as his Venezuelan works became better known. In addition to two sketches, three other versions of the landscape of the San Esteban plantation are known, from 1847, 1849, and 1856 respectively, with diferent titles and dimensions. At the Sugar Mill is the largest and probably the latest of these versions. Although Bellermann did not date the canvas, stylistically it is safe to assume that it dates from c. 1868–70.

The sketches and later versions difer more in execution than in composition, and the assorted iterations vary only in small details. In the opinion of Venezuelan art historian Alfredo Boulton, the sketches are painted with a pictorial technique that makes them “ . . . more free and spontaneous, rich and textured, abundant, vigorously expressive . . . while in the larger canvases . . . his technique has evolved toward more cautious brushstrokes, less free and more academic.”4 This is also true of the series of oil paintings of San Esteban.

In the deep compositional view of At the Sugar Mill, Bellermann’s contemplative gaze registered the river and mountains reaching up to the sky romantically on the right, but he painted the foreground with Humboldtian precision and minute detail. In the lower section we can clearly distinguish sugarcane plants, whose cultivation and processing dominates the plantation’s activity. In the painting’s central planes Bellermann depicts human fgures, including groups of slaves who execute the manual tasks of nineteenth-century Venezuelan sugar plantations; along with cofee and cacao plantations, sugar factories were then the mainstay of the Venezuelan economy. The bluish whites and grays of the stream, the river, the horse, the buildings, and the smoke emanating from one of the houses, along with certain outstanding chromatic accents, enliven the intense greens that cover the rest of this seductive and picturesque tropical image.

rafael romero d.

1 Ferdinand Bellermann, Venezuelan Diaries 1842–1845 (Caracas: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 42.

2 In 2007, the National Gallery of Art in Caracas published a Spanish version of Ferdinand Bellermann’s Venezuelan diaries, based on the transcription of the original manuscript from classical to modern German. The transcription and critical study were undertaken by Helga Weissgärber, a specialist on the work of the Prussian painter who also served for many years as Curator for the artist’s Venezuelan collection, belonging to the Berlin State Museums. This valuable manuscript has been preserved by the great-great-grandson of the painter, Mr. Peter Bellermann.

3 Bellermann, Venezuelan Diaries, 54.

4 Alfredo Boulton, “Ferdinand Bellermann in Venezuela,” in Ferdinand Bellermann in Venezuela: Memoirs of Landscape 1842–1845 (Caracas: National Gallery of Art, December 1991–February 1992), 12.

Ferdinand Bellermann (1814–1889), Germany

At the Sugar Mill, c. 1868–70 Oil on canvas, 144.8 × 182.9 cm (57 × 72 inches)

Anton Goering Ferdinand Bellermann

In September 1799, Alexander von Humboldt visited the Guácharo Cave, near the town of Caripe in Venezuela. He was accompanied by French botanist Aimé Bonpland, his companion during his entire American journey, as well as two Capuchin friars, and a group of local indigenous people who guided them. The cavern’s name is derived from a species of nocturnal bird known as the guácharo (Steatornis caripensis) that inhabits it.

So impressed was Humboldt by the cave’s wonders and beauty that he mentioned it to Ferdinand Bellermann shortly prior to the young painter’s departure for Venezuela in May of 1842, recommending that he be sure to visit this natural wonder. Years later, Bellermann imagined the scene of Humboldt’s arrival at the cave’s majestic entrance, and he depicted it—possibly as an homage to his mentor—in two oil paintings dated 1879 and 1880, respectively. The 1879 work regrettably disappeared in 1945.

Bellermann’s Guácharo Cave of 1874 shows the arrival of other European explorers at the entrance of the cavern. Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett preserves three sketches for the oil painting that depicts the cave’s entrance, one of which is a unique view from the cave’s interior looking outward.1 In addition, there is a pencil study of its stalactite formations.

Arriving at the cave in August of 1843, the young painter’s impressions were as intense as Humboldt’s had been. In a recently discovered text, Bellermann states, “I have never before seen anything more imposing . . . everything is fantastic, more beautiful than any architecture. When I suddenly emerged from the dark forest into the dazzling light of the sun and galloped toward the entrance of the Cave it was as if the mountain were opening up, as if in a fairy tale. I leapt from my horse and danced with joy out of having arrived at such a magically picturesque place.”2

Two focal points stand out for their luminous and narrative emphasis: the majestic entrance to the cave, and the troupe visiting it for the frst time. The entrance is bathed in an intense, almost unreal light, with golden and marmoreal tones, making it appear like a mysterious ancient temple. Crowning the mouth of the cave are mountain peaks enveloped by a light fog and the clouded sky, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of the work of German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, one of Bellermann’s known infuences. With its grandiosity and beauty, this scene attains a sublime quality that Bellermann’s other paintings of the Venezuelan landscape also achieve.

The group of travelers, which possibly includes the artist at its front,

A Guácharo Cave, Southeast of Caripe (Cueva Clara), 1867

Guácharo Cave, 1874

immediately attracts one’s gaze. The fgures are lit from the left by the diaphanous light of the morning, shining through an opening in the forest canopy. This is not the frst time the painter employed this tool in order to contrast humanity’s minute stature to nature’s majestic immensity. Several scholars of the painter’s work, including Alfredo Boulton, Renate Löschner, and Helga Weissgärber, point out that this aspect of Bellermann’s composition and lighting has its origins in the landscapes of Claude Lorrain, who favored scenic theatricality. Löschner notes that “amidst the tropical landscape, while contemplating particularly impressive scenes of nature, the works of the ‘old Masters’ were called to mind, compositions by Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain, with the latter being visible above all in his use of the ‘magnificent efects’ brought about by the light of the tropics.”3

The remainder of this work is occupied by abundant and exuberant jungle vegetation, rendered with enough precision to allow each of the species’ identifcation. Throughout much of his Venezuelan journey, including the visit to the cave, Bellermann was accompanied by German and Belgian naturalists Carl Moritz and Nicolaus Funck, who enriched the painter’s botanical knowledge. The dense, tall trees of the virgin jungle frame the entrance to the cave, which emerges like an apparition behind a thick curtain of green. Interrupting this repertoire of diverse and attractive green, ochre, and earth tones is the frothy white stream, whose rapids run across the painting’s foreground. Only with the help of the indigenous Chaimas, the primary inhabitants of this Venezuelan jungle landscape, can the European travelers cross over this natural obstacle and gain access to the promised wonders of the cave.

Anton Goering, another German artist who visited the Guácharo Cave region in the nineteenth century painted A Guácharo Cave, Southeast of Caripe, 1867, which depicts Cueva Clara. Comparing this image to Bellermann’s, we can note the diferences in the two artists’ approaches to landscape. In his vast, inclusive view of the Guácharo Cave, Bellermann, a painter above all, concentrates on the representation of atmosphere, the production of feelings and the creation of beauty, while at the same time remaining loyal to the reality he observes. Goering, on the other hand, moves in close with his scientifc lens, focusing on the details of the cave and its surroundings, seeking to achieve a register that would be useful primarily to the natural sciences, yet without forsaking color and charm.

rafael romero d.

1 Helga Weissgärber was the frst to catalogue the work of Ferdinand Bellermann in the Berlin State Museums. Her work was included in the catalogue for the exhibition “Ferdinand Bellermann, 1914–1889,” Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett und Nationalgalerie, August–October 1982.

2 For this and other valuable information included here, I am indebted to Thomas von Taschitzki, Curator of Painting for the Anger Museum in Erfurt, the artist’s birthplace. He organized the museum’s show in celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ferdinand Bellermann (October 2014–January 2015). The text in question is the missing portion of the manuscripts that were transcribed for the Spanish language edition of the artist’s Venezuelan diaries. The originals were preserved in the archives of the painter’s great-great-grandson, Dr. Martin Bellermann, in Düsseldorf, Germany, to whom we are grateful for permission to reproduce this excerpt. (Translation from German to Spanish by Peggy Kuhs.)

3 Renate Löschner, Bellermann and the Venezuelan Landscape 1842–1845 (Caracas: Humboldt Cultural Association/Neumann Foundation, 1977), 23.

Anton Goering (1836–1905), Germany

A Guácharo Cave, Southeast of Caripe (Cueva Clara), 1867 Watercolor on paper, 37 × 26 cm (14 X × 10 N inches)

Ferdinand Bellermann (1814–1889), Germany

Guácharo Cave, 1874

Oil on canvas, 118.7 × 156.8 cm (46 O × 61 O inches)

Jean-León Pallière

Jean-León Pallière Grandjean Ferreira was born in Rio de Janeiro to a family of artists.1 In 1836 he began his studies in the atelier of Francisco Picot in Paris. In 1848 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, and a year later he received a travel prize, which allowed him to return to Europe. He embarked upon a grand tour across Spain and Morocco, bolstering his traveler’s spirit, which would endure through his on-and-of residency in Buenos Aires from 1855 to 1866.2

The voyage from March to October of 1858 is described in his Diario de viaje por la América del Sud [South American Travel Journal].3 During the trip, he made an efort to produce sketches and studies. These descriptive observations are the basis for a visual archive to which he returned freely in order to compose his oil paintings, watercolors, and lithographs. There are constant orientalist references in the diary, with analogies between gauchos and Arabs.4 In this case, although an extended residency transformed the traveler into a resident, his imagined reader was always European, so the subjective telling of the story tends to complement the descriptive information. In this sense, the paragraph dedicated to a wagon convoy is pertinent, for its resemblance to painting: “ We are in the midst of the pampa, but with mountains upon the horizon. In the distance before us a line of wagons moves forward, each one pulled by three teams of oxen . . . the overseer of the wagons moves to the front of the caravan, riding a mule and wearing a large poncho that comes down to the middle of his saddle; next comes the line of wagons, rolling slowly and heavily along; their conductors, savage in appearance and bizarrely dressed, stand out against a dark background, holding up the immense lances they use to prod the faraway oxen. Such a spectacle, in the midst of this deserted prairie, takes on an entirely biblical tone.”5

Pallière rarely dated his works, and moreover his reiteration of events and motifs diminishes the usefulness of those mentions from the press of his time that might otherwise help us to precisely date the works. Without a doubt, A Caravan of Gauchos and their Wagons Crossing the Pampas, Argentina originated during the voyage from Rosario to Mendoza, nearer to the destination—he arrived on March 24, 1858— than the point of departure. The horizontal format allows a panoramic view of the landscape, with a more distanced point of view relative to the wagons than in the previous watercolor.6

The representation of soldiers, marching battalions, and wagon camps is a constant feature of the French artist’s works.7 In the joint exhibition of Pallière and Henry Sheridan in June of 1859, out of sixty paintings there was one exhibited with the title A Caravan of Gauchos

A Caravan of Gauchos and their Wagons Crossing the Pampas, Argentina, n.d.

and their Wagons Crossing the Pampas. John Le Long describes it as “a large oil painting that depicts a convoy of wagons pulled by oxen in the middle of the immense pampa, the ground and sky being the handiwork of Sheridan, an English painter renowned in this genre.” (La Tribuna, 26 February 1864).8 It is impossible to know with certainty whether that may have been the same work we see here, which was simply signed by the French artist.9

roberto amigo (translated by phillip penix- tadsen)

1 For more on Julien Pallière and his son, see Ana Pessoa, Julio Bandeira E., and Pedro Corrêa do Lago, Pallière e o Brasil. Obra completa (Rio de Janeiro: Capivara, 2011).

2 Julio E. Payró, Pallière (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 1961).

3 It began on a steamboat down the Paraná river to Rosario (he accompanied Duke Wilhelm of Mecklenburg Schwerin and his aide Baron Georg von Brackenheim), a transaction to Mendoza, a mountain crossing, Santiago and Valparaíso; a boat to Cobija, a crossing of the Atacama desert; Salta, Tucumán, Santiago del Estero, then further on to Córdoba and Rosario, and his return trip to Buenos Aires. His frst voyage was likely undertaken with his classmate León Ambrose Gauthier from 1856 to 1857. The other voyage, from 1859 to 1861, took him to Paranaguá, Gran Chaco, and Misiones. He spent 1862 and 1863 in Rio de Janeiro and France.

4 Roberto Amigo, “Beduinos en la pampa. Apuntes sobre la imagen del gaucho y el orientalismo de los pintores franceses” in Revista Historia y Sociedad [History and Society Review] no. 13 (Medellín: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, November 2007): 25–44.

5 León Pallière, Diario de viaje por la América del Sud (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Peuser, 1945), 113. Introduction, translation and notes by Miguel Solá and Ricardo Gutiérrez.

6 Bonifacio del Carril, Monumenta Iconographica. Paisajes, ciudades, tipos, usos y costumbres de la argentina, 1536-1860 (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1964), plate LCXV. Dated 1858, 30 x 90 cm. From the collection of González Garaño.

7 The frst of these may have been the aforementioned painting, in the frst reference to his work: “ . . . he has painted a wagon full of wool like those that come to the 11th of September market, with admirable fdelity in the depiction of the conductors’ garb and customs” (El Nacional, April 24, 1856). The last one was probably Mercado de frutos, lithographed by Jules Pelvilain in Álbum Pallière. Escenas americanas (Buenos Aires: Lit. Pelvilain, 1864).

8 Quoted in Payró, Pallière, 28. Sheridan executed landscapes in Indios del Gran Chaco and in views of Montevideo.

9 “Troupes of wagons” were noted in the auction held in the house of Mariano Billinghurst (La Tribuna, 12 March 1861), and did not fgure among the goods he sold in preparation for his defnitive return to France in 1866.

Jean-León Pallière (1823–1887), Brazil

A Caravan of Gauchos and their Wagons Crossing the Pampas, Argentina, n.d. Oil on canvas, 45.1 × 78.1 cm (17 O × 30 O inches)

Robert

Ker Porter

Rounding Up Cattle on the Apurean Plains and The Lake of Valencia were produced in 1832 by Robert Ker Porter, a traveler artist and writer who was knighted fve times during his tenure as British Consul to Venezuela. Although Porter’s appointment in 1825 was intended to be “purely commercial,” he dedicated himself to his position, serving as de facto foreign minister during the 1826 revolts against Simón Bolívar, and he was promoted to the title of Charge d’Afaires in 1835.1 These duties necessitated the nearly total abandonment of his career as an artist and writer. Although Porter lamented this concession, it may be argued that it allowed him to make drawings that convey an informality not visible in his previous work.2 Perhaps, as a civil servant, Porter was free to pursue his art making in a more recreational capacity, turning away from his neoclassical training to take on a more expressive approach in representing the surrounding landscape.

Robert Ker Porter began his formal training in painting in 1790, studying under Benjamin West at the newly established Royal Academy of the Arts in London. There, Porter completed a two-hundredfoot battle scene panorama, Storming of Seringapatam, which was a sensation.3 Additionally, Porter served as a captain in the Westminster Militia, accompanying the British troops to Spain and Portugal.4

One can see references to battle rendered in the foreground of both drawings. In Rounding Up Cattle on the Apurean Plains, we can see several llaneros on horseback, herding cattle. The llaneros had played a key role in Venezuela’s war for independence from Spain, and Porter knew of their reputation as tenacious fghters and excellent horsemen.5 In the lower-left corner, one of the riders wields a spear—like those used by the llaneros during the war.

In the lower-right corner of The Lake of Valencia, a fgure on horseback carries a spear and appears to be wearing a morion.6 The man walking beside him carries a sword on his left hip and wears clothing popular in Spain during the sixteenth century, and one infers that these fgures are supposed to be conquistadors from a previous century. Their inclusion adds a historical, narrative embellishment and reminds us of Porter ’s early interest in battle scene painting. In both works, Porter’s desire for precision is evident in the light pencil marks made to delineate the mountainous horizon.

Porter’s dedication to objective representation inspired an expedition. He had seen four drawings, by as many diferent artists, of a single Mesopotamian artifact. Struck by their subjective inaccuracies, Porter

Rounding Up Cattle on the Apurean Plains, 1832

The Lake of Valencia, 1832

set out in 1817 to see and draw the object for himself, beginning a journey through the Near East that would last for thirty months.7

The observational drawings he made in Venezuela after his arrival there in 1825 are far more expressive and gestural than those made during his earlier travels spurred by the Mesopotamian artifact. Perhaps, as a consul paid a modest salary of approximately $1,500, Porter was consequently no longer dependent on producing accurate battle scenes or strict observational renderings to survive.8 He was free to let the open sky dominate the image, to reduce the cattle horns in Rounding Up Cattle on the Apurean Plains into short gestural lines, and to translate the lush forest surrounding Lake Valencia into soft brush marks. While these two drawings are easily the least elaborate images in Porter’s oeuvre, they are also the most expressive and imaginative.

elizabeth lewin

1 William Armstrong, “British Representation in Venezuela in 1826,” Caribbean Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1960): 18–25. William Armstrong, “The Many-sided World of Sir Robert Ker Porter,” Historian 25, no. 1 (1962): 36–57. Jane de Grummond, “Sir Robert Ker Porter’s Caracas Diary, 1825–1842: A British Diplomat in a Newborn Nation by Robert Ker Porter; Walter Dupouy,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 48, no. 4 (1968): 720–21.

2 Porter wrote in a letter: “ . . . the painting that now engrosses my unofcially employed time I have taken on myself to accomplish (and must) within a given time . . . in order not to permit my more paramount duties to be neglected (those of my country) I am compelled to be sadly careful of every moment. . . .” Armstrong, “The Many-sided World of Sir Robert Ker Porter.”

3 Armstrong, “The Many-sided World of Sir Robert Ker Porter.”

4 “Death of Sir Robert Ker Porter, The Painter and Traveller,” in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, vol. 1 (London: Hugh Cunningham, 1842), 359–361; Armstrong, “The Many-sided World of Sir Robert Ker Porter.”

5 M. Jane Loy, “Horsemen of the Tropics: A Comparative View of the Llaneros in the History of Venezuela and Colombia,” Boletin Americanista no. 31 (1981): 159–167.

6 J. H. Von Hefner-Alteneck, Medieval Arms and Armor: A Pictorial Archive (Mineola, NY: Dover Pictorial Archive Series, 2004).

7 Armstrong, “The Many-sided World of Sir Robert Ker Porter.”

8 Ibid.

Robert Ker Porter (1777–1842), United Kingdom

Rounding Up Cattle on the Apurean Plains, 1832

Watercolor and ink on paper, 36.5 × 51.8 cm (14 W × 20 W inches)

Robert Ker Porter (1777–1842), United Kingdom

The Lake of Valencia, 1832

Watercolor and ink on paper, 37 × 52 cm (14 I⁄af × 20 K inches)

Marc

Ferrez

Among the frst generation of Brazilian photographers, Marc Ferrez traveled extensively in Brazil, photographing the landscape. Rather than emphasizing an exotic, ideal, or timeless landscape, as many foreign image-makers did, Ferrez created pictures of Brazil undergoing the process of industrialization. Tijuca Falls presents a world in transition, from old technology to new, from European domination to Creole rule, and from the foreign perception of Brazil as exotic and tropical to a local understanding of the shifting status of the landscape and its relationship to modernity.

While markers of modernity exist throughout Ferrez’s work, his images also incorporate compositional conventions of European landscape painting. Trained as a sculptor in France, Ferrez would have recognized the waterfall as a trope used to represent the grandeur of nature in landscape painting. In his infuential eighteenth-century text on ideas of the sublime and the beautiful, Edmund Burke describes a “thundering cataract” as one of the best ways to evoke feelings of the sublime in the viewer.1 In Tijuca Falls the water pours over the jagged surface of the mountain with a force that is palpable, despite the softening efect of a long exposure. Everything in the image seems dark and wet from the spray of the falls, and the image expresses the overwhelming power of nature.

Ferrez was not the frst photographer working in Brazil to use the waterfall as his subject. Both the French photographer Victor Frond (1821–1881) and his German colleague Augusto Stahl (1828–1877) traveled around the country and took images of waterfalls that clearly expressed the power of the earth. Their example demonstrated for Ferrez how to transfer a theme from the traditional medium of painting to the newest photographic technology. The market for this type of “view ” photography, or images of the landscape as opposed to portraiture, was almost entirely foreign to Brazil, and Stahl and Frond catered to the European desire for images that showed Brazil at its wildest and most tropical.2

Ferrez’s image of Tijuca Falls diverges from the compositions of his predecessors by adding a human presence.3 Rather than focusing exclusively on the majesty of the falls, he complicates the composition by adding two women in the lower area of the frame. Standing on a massive jutting rock at the bottom of the cascade, they are shown posing for the camera wearing delicate white dresses and carrying parasols. Their clothes and demeanor suggest that they are upper-class women from the city, on an outing in the countryside, which is likely, as Tijuca Falls

was an easy journey from Rio de Janeiro. According to the historian Robert Levine, the inclusion of people in nineteenth-century photographs of the land often signifed the civilizing presence of culture over the environment.4 Images portraying people in the landscape—either occupied by leisure activities or working as miners or agricultural laborers—were popular with Creole consumers. As such, Tijuca Falls would have been far more appealing to a Brazilian collector of photography than a visiting European.

Ferrez’s choice of this particular waterfall also referenced a story of more interest to Brazilians than to Europeans. The Tijuca Forest, where the fall is located, was populated with second-growth trees. The dense leaves framing the falls were all from relatively young plants, grown in after the area had been stripped bare by cofee plantations.5 Tijuca Falls points to the complexity of the relationship between Brazilians and the land, which was not only an incredible resource for industry but also required protection.

This tension between industry and the delicacy of the land persists throughout Ferrez’s photos, but it was most evident in the images he took on expeditions with the mining and railroad companies to document their technological progress. For these works, he received great recognition, winning a prize for his photographs of the Brazilian Geological Survey at Philadelphia’s 1876 Universal Exhibition. The Emperor Dom Pedro chose Brazil’s submission for this presentation and Ferrez was likely a political choice since his images almost never depicted poverty, slavery, or any of the harsher realities of life under the empire. According to many scholars, including Pedro Vasquez and Robert Myers, Ferrez’s work presented an “idealized photographic vision of imperial Brazil.”6 Tijuca Falls seems to support this claim in its presentation of the Brazilian landscape as a space for the upper classes to enjoy in leisure.

claire pauley mcpherson

Tijuca Falls, c. 1885

1 Joshua C. Taylor, “Introduction to ‘Essay on Picturesque Beauty’ by William Gilpin,” in Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 47.

2 Robert M Levine, Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents (Durham: Duke University Press 1989), 5.

3 Gilberto Ferrez and Weston J. Naef, Pioneer Photographers of Brazil (New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1976), 24.

4 Levine, 34.

5 Jose Drummond, “The Garden in the Machine: An Environmental History of Brazil’s Tijuca Forest,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (January 1996): 83–104.

6 Paul Vasquez and Robert Myers, “Marc Ferrez: A Master of Brazilian Photography,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 21, Brazil Theme Issue (1995): 30.

Marc Ferrez (1843–1923), Brazil

Tijuca Falls, c. 1885

Vintage photographic print, 39.4 × 27.9 cm (15 K × 11 inches)

EXPEDITIONS

ROBERT H . SCHOMBURGK

AUGUSTE MORISOT

Robert H. Schomburgk

In 1835, four years after Guiana had become a British colony, Robert Hermann Schomburgk began working under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society to initiate a series of exploratory expeditions in the colony’s interior.1 Surveyor, cartographer, Humboldtian naturalist, and—most devotedly—botanist, Schomburgk traversed, mapped, collected, and catalogued his way through the terra incognita of England’s sole territory in South America. Published in 1840, Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana was sold on a subscription basis to a group of 360 elite individuals living in Europe and the Americas.2

Schomburgk’s Twelve Views presents information about Guiana that is both broad and fnely focused. Lithographs depicting picturesque views of what had been the visually undocumented topography of Guiana’s interior are keyed to precise geographic coordinates on the map. Schomburgk made meticulous recordings of his daily observations. Maps, images, and texts immerse readers in a broadly informative series of vignettes about Guiana.3

Taken from Schomburgk’s original reports, the text, in particular, reveals the explorer’s deep, personal afnity for Guiana. While landscape images utilizing aspects of the picturesque and sublime had their use in a portfolio intended to introduce the nineteenth-century public to the wonders of the British colony (and certainly Schomburgk found them pleasing), it is one image, the frontispiece, which represents what Schomburgk found most compelling about his exploration of the colony.

The lithographs of Twelve Views are the work of many hands: a draftsman, the artist, stone engravers, printers, and a colorist. The artist credited on the title page, Charles Bentley, made his drawings from sketches (now lost) provided by the expedition draftsman, John Morrison.4 Schomburgk tells us that the sketches were taken “under my direction.”5 While this assertion may seem pure pretention, a careful consideration of the character of Schomburgk—the obsessive attention to detail evident in his writings and his dedication to his work, as well as his artistic ability—suggest that his assertion was true.6 Indeed, text and image in the Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana can best be understood as a composite project refecting the vision of the expedition’s leader, Robert Schomburgk.

As with most of the lithographs in Twelve Views, The Comuti or Taquiare Rock contains elements typical of nineteenth-century landscape representation. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful Edmund Burke speaks of vastness and infnity as qualities capable of evoking the sublime.7 Ofered

as the frst of the twelve views, this image situates the viewer safely on a high promontory looking out over an immense savannah extending far of into the distance. Tucked safely behind a picturesque scene of rocks, fora, and fauna, we read Schomburgk’s description, “So enchanting was this view, that I was at a loss where to commence in order not to overlook any object in the lovely picture. . . .”8 Yet Schomburgk’s narrative also relates the detail of the view in much less fowery terms, naming the two tall rock formations in the foreground as well as those of the geological features in the distance, and including a description of the Essequibo River below.9 His entry for this view ends with ruminations over the possible origins of Indian “picture writing” that he found on a rock at Comuti, accompanied by their fnely drawn image.10

In the year 1595, the popular tales of a glittering city located on a vast inland sea (Manoa or Parima) ruled by a prince called El Dorado who ritually covered his body with powdered gold were embellished and expanded upon by the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh in his book, The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana.11 The possibility of its existence lured many to gamble their lives in its pursuit. Like so many others, Raleigh never found the “auriferous” El Dorado, but its storied existence echoed down through the centuries and formed part of the nineteenth-century collective consciousness. Time had shown that this golden kingdom had never existed. Up until the early nineteenth century, belief in certain elements of the myth, such as the inland sea, persisted. Schomburgk was asked to update Raleigh’s book in the early 1840s, and in his introduction, he relates that Humboldt had proved that there was no inland sea, but that stories of its existence were based on seasonal fooding somewhere on Guiana’s vast savannahs.12

In his description of the view Pirara and Lake Amucu, Schomburgk lays claim to having discovered the place that had given rise to the fables. While Humboldt asserted that there was no inland sea, Schomburgk gave evidence for having discovered the sea that had been. After recounting the geography/hydrography—a vast savannah encompassed by mountains on all sides—he states, “The geological structure of this region leaves but little doubt that it was once the bed of an inland lake, which by one of those catastrophes, of which even later times give us examples, broke its barriers, and forced a path for its waters to the Atlantic.”13 The fgure in the foreground directs viewers’ attention toward the scene in the distance. The sharp drop just beyond the ground on which he stands curves gently to the left and seems to meet with the wall of mountains in the distance; both of these features

Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana, 1840

(the raised bit of foreground and the mountains) are unbounded and extend beyond the picture plane to our right. The arrangement of these elements strongly suggests the now empty bowl of a vast body of water. Despite its spurious origins—Schomburgk, in fact, attributed its inception to Satan—the El Dorado myth had acquired such epic proportions that its co-option here lends an air of the sublime to the image and to Schomburgk’s reputation as an explorer. Schomburgk had strong connections to Pirara, having spent the winter of 1838 there and admitting to being fond of the place.14 Lest we think this view contrived, in the text he specifcally muses over the number of times he has sat near the three palm trees in the left foreground and enjoyed the scene beyond.15

Schomburgk’s writings convey the deep sense of respect for the indigenous people of the colony that grew out of his Christian beliefs. He was witness to a descimento, a Brazilian slaving raid inficted on a group of Amerindians in Guiana in which a group of forty people consisting of mostly older men, younger children, and women were burned out of their villages and carried of to bondage.16 This incident prompted him to set of for London to push for the establishment of a set boundary between British Guiana and Brazil that would prevent these raids, a task that eventually he himself would complete.17

There is a quality in the rendering of the view of Watu Ticaba that refects the matter-of-fact tone of Schomburgk’s text on the Amerindians. There is a sense of realism conveyed through the fgures’ natural poses, the lifelike detail and overall evenly keyed color; a feeling that the viewer is walking toward the scene anticipating interaction with its inhabitants on an equal footing, rather than standing outside as a curious onlooker to gaze at “the other.”

More than anything else, Schomburgk was an ardent botanist. He collected live plants and dried specimens by the thousands—primarily for science, but frequently, and more crucially, for money. Victorian England was a culture immersed in a fower craze and in love with gardening.18 Selling plants could be a lucrative business. Schomburgk became a supplier of live plants for a nursery in London, and through advertisements in botanical journals sold dried specimens to subscribers as well.19 Among all his wondrous fnds and the new species he identifed, one would far surpass them all: a giant water lily found on the river Berbice. With leaves fve to six feet across, and extremely fragrant, nocturnally blooming fowers a foot across, it was hardly to be believed.20 For a nation already in the throes of “fower fever”

Robert H. Schomburgk (1804–1865), United Kingdom, and Charles Bentley (1806–1854), United Kingdom, Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana, 1840, lithograph, 37.5 × 54.6 cm (14O  × 21K inches)

the impact of such a fnd is difcult to comprehend. Brought back to England and cultivated to bloom by the work of many hands, the plant became a sensation. Joseph Paxton based the design for the ribbing and glass of the Crystal Palace on the structure of the lily’s leaves.21 Eventually named after Queen Victoria, Victoria regia, Schomburgk’s lily became the national fower of Guiana.

The frontispiece of Twelve Views was not included in the original plans for the book, and was ofered as a bonus piece by Schomburgk. Closely and appropriately aligned with the tone of Schomburgk’s text, this image welcomes viewers to what was no longer terra incognita with the two elements that Schomburgk considered most signifcant: the giant water lily and two dignifed Amerindians.22 Schomburgk’s narrative describes the indigenous people as “proud of the productions of their native home . . . as if bidding the rest of the world to produce a scene of equal beauty, and a plant so deservedly connected with the name of her, whom they acknowledge as their Queen, during whose reign, they, like the African races, look forward for that justice, which will tend to the amelioration of their forlorn situation.”23 Shortly after the printing of Twelve Views, Schomburgk completed the boundary survey fxing Guiana’s borders, borders that Schomburgk hoped would end the slavers’ incursions into the colony, and which remain much the same today. It is clear that as Schomburgk traversed and collected his way through the interior of Guiana, its natural landscape and its people had made a signifcant impact on him. He felt strongly that England owed its assistance to the indigenous people of its colony and no doubt considered his book an important tool for raising awareness of their plight.

Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana provided images of geographical landmarks in the colony that became iconic.24 Subsequent reprints commissioned by the Guyana Heritage Society in 2010 and 2013 are evidence of the work’s enduring signifcance.25 Even today, the wonderfully rendered images and text of Twelve Views exudes Schomburgk’s enthusiasm and the excitement of exploring the terra incognita that was Guiana.

stephanie lish

1 D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 21–22.

2 Ibid., 125.

3 Burnett cites Edward Tufte’s use of the term “micro/macro” to describe a way of displaying visual information such as a map with views. I am making a similar comparison but one that uses Schomburgk’s text as an even smaller focal point. Ibid., 128

4 Robert H. Schomburgk, Esq., Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana (London: Ackermann and Co., 1841), title page, preface.

5 Ibid.

6 The Natural History Museum in London has a collection of Schomburgk’s watercolors and drawings. The Museum of Natural History, London, http://www.nhm .ac.uk/nature-online/art-nature-imaging/collections/art-themes/northamerica/ more/schomburgk_more_info.htm. Also see: St. John Historical Society, http:// stjohnhistoricalsociety.org/a-few-words-about-our-website-home-page-images/.

7 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: J. Dodsley, 1757) 127–129.

8 Schomburgk, Twelve Views, 3.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Sir Walter Raleigh and Robert H. Schomburgk, ed., Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, reprinted from the edition of 1596 (London: Richard and John E. Taylor for The Hakluyt Society, 1848), 20–30.

12 Burnett, Masters, 26. Robert Schomburgk, Introduction to Sir Walter Raleigh, Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, reprinted from the edition of 1596 (London: Richard and John E. Taylor for The Hakluyt Society, 1848), Ibid., liii–liv.

13 Schomburgk, Twelve Views, 8

14 Ibid., 9.

15 Ibid., 9.

16 Ibid., 9.

17 Holway, The Flower of Empire, 117–118.

18 Ibid., 2

19 Ibid., 11, 19, 45, 50, 63.

20 Ibid., 23

21 Margaret Flanders Darby, Joseph Paxton’s Water Lily (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 2006), 272

22 Holway, The Flower of Empire, 168.

23 Schomburgk, Twelve Views, 2.

24 Burnett, Masters, 161.

25 Petamber Persaud, “Reprinting Rare and Out of Print Books,” Kaieteur News Online, April 11, 2010, http://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2010/04/11/ reprinting-rare-and-out-of-print-books/.

Robert H. Schomburgk (1804–1865), United Kingdom, and Charles Bentley (1806–1854), United Kingdom Esmeralda on the Orinoco. Site of a Spanish Mission, plate 8, from Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana, 1840 Lithograph, 37.5 × 54.6 cm (14O × 21 K inches)

Robert H. Schomburgk (1804–1865), United Kingdom, and Charles Bentley (1806–1854), United Kingdom

The Comuti or Taquiare Rock, on the River Essequibo, plate 1, from Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana, 1840 Lithograph, 37.5 × 54.6 cm (14O × 21 K inches)

Robert H. Schomburgk (1804–1865), United Kingdom, and Charles Bentley (1806–1854), United Kingdom Caribi Village Anai, Near the River Rupununi, plate 12, from Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana, 1840 Lithograph, 37.5 × 54.6 cm (14O × 21 K inches)

Robert H. Schomburgk (1804–1865), United Kingdom, and Charles Bentley (1806–1854), United Kingdom Pirara and Lake Amucu, The Site of El Dorado, plate 3, from Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana, 1840 Lithograph, 37.5 × 54.6 cm (14O × 21 K inches)

Robert H. Schomburgk (1804–1865), United Kingdom, and Charles Bentley (1806–1854), United Kingdom Brazilian Fort St. Gabriel, on the River Negro, plate 9, from Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana, 1840 Lithograph, 37.5 × 54.6 cm (14O × 21 K inches)

Robert H. Schomburgk (1804–1865), United Kingdom, and Charles Bentley (1806–1854), United Kingdom Christmas Cataract, on the River Berbice, plate 10, from Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana, 1840 Lithograph, 37.5 × 54.6 cm (14O × 21 K inches)

Robert H. Schomburgk (1804–1865), United Kingdom, and Charles Bentley (1806–1854), United Kingdom

Watu Ticaba, a Wapisiana Village, plate 11, from Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana, 1840 Lithograph, 37.5 × 54.6 cm (14O × 21 K inches)

Robert H. Schomburgk (1804–1865), United Kingdom, and Charles Bentley (1806–1854), United Kingdom

Ataraipu or the Devil’s Rock, plate 2, from Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana, 1840 Lithograph, 37.5 × 54.6 cm (14O × 21 K inches)

Robert H. Schomburgk (1804–1865), United Kingdom, and Charles Bentley (1806–1854), United Kingdom

Roraima. A Remarkable Range of Sandstone Mountains in Guiana, plate 5, from Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana, 1840 Lithograph, 37.5 × 54.6 cm (14O × 21 K inches)

Robert H. Schomburgk (1804–1865), United Kingdom, and Charles Bentley (1806–1854), United Kingdom

Map of Guayana to Illustrate the Route of R. H. Schomburgk Esq. from Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana, 1840 Lithograph, 37.5 × 54.6 cm (14O × 21 K inches)

Auguste Morisot

Auguste Morisot (1857–1951) documented the Orinoco River at the end of the nineteenth century, almost a century later than the preceding European expedition. One of the largest rivers in South America, the 1,700-mile-long Orinoco begins in the Parima Mountains of the Guiana Highlands and fows through rainforest, fooded forest, grassland, and a wide delta into the Atlantic Ocean. The French naturalist and explorer Jean Chafanjon completed three scientifc expeditions to the Orinoco Delta between 1884 and 1890. Auguste Morisot, a versatile, Lyon-based artist, accompanied Chafanjon on his second Orinoco excursion from 1886 to 1887. Together they traversed upriver the upper third of the Orinoco in Venezuela and the Federal Territory of Amazonas. The young Morisot, who studied at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon (École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon), was eager to advance his social and professional standing by embarking on such a faraway adventure, and formally signed on to the expedition on January 28, 1886.1 Although during his lifetime Morisot’s Orinoco material was only privately known, his tropical sojourn would continue to inform his prolifc artistic career in Lyon.2

As expedition artist, Morisot’s Orinoco artworks responded to Chafanjon’s ambitious scientifc agenda. In Chafanjon’s 1889 narrative of their journey, El Orinoco y el Caura, the naturalist signaled the expedition’s objectives as the pursuit of anthropological, geological, botanical, zoological, and geographical knowledge as well as to identify the river’s source, which he formally announced that he had found on December 18, 1886.3 In turn, Morisot would set his sights on recording fora, fauna, peoples, and landscapes encountered along the way in an impressively broad range of techniques. In his artistic practice, Morisot often reproduced the same composition across the various media at his disposal. Morisot created over four hundred ffty drawings, watercolors, monotypes, and oils. This eclectic oeuvre cannot be assigned to a single stylistic movement, although Morisot’s painting style would become close to the Nabis in his later professional years.4 Morisot also produced detailed botanical and zoological studies for Chafanjon. These works then passed into French museum collections and have yet to be identifed. Morisot’s watercolors give an impression of the artist’s talent as a scientifc illustrator working with a lyrical line that anticipates art nouveau (see p. 242). Morisot also contributed to the sixty-seven photographs of the expedition taken primarily by Chafanjon. One of these shows the formidable Maipure rapids, which the expedition crossed in October 1866 (see p. 243). Given the limita-

tions of early photography, which was already in use on expeditions to Latin America dating from the 1840s, an artist was still required to capture details and colors.5 Thus the model of the traveler artist serving on a scientifc expedition in the manner of Captain James Cook’s South Pacifc voyages was still in place when Chafanjon collaborated with Morisot toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Morisot admitted in his travel diary that beyond a rudimentary familiarity, he regrettably had not informed himself about earlier Orinoco explorers and missions. Morisot’s casual preparation in Lyon prior to the trip consisted of sketching plants and animals at zoos and gardens. This indicates that the artist did not consciously reference earlier impressions as he created his own.6 Morisot, nevertheless, was sometimes moved to depict experiences and views registered by earlier travelers. En route to Venezuela, he created a rough pencil sketch of a natural vista with overt historic precedence: Le Carbet, the site where Christopher Columbus landed in Martinique on June 15, 1502 (see p. 244). Morisot again recalled Columbus when he expressed the hope that the region would still resemble a Biblical Eden as Columbus described.7 More generally, the large scale of tropical nature was a theme popular among nineteenth-century travelers. Morisot’s composition Ceiba Tree, in which two diminutive human fgures stand beside the lofty tree with elaborate buttress roots, participates in this taste for singular American tropical nature (see p.  245). Morisot’s watercolor

Christian Gottlieb Schick (1776–1812), Germany, Nocturnal Scene of Alexander von Humboldt on the Orinoco, from Allgemeine Geographische Ephemeriden 22, 1807, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussicher Kulturbesitz

Night in the Jungle, 8 one of four copies, was painted on the banks of the Orinoco in the Estado Bolívar and resonates with an earlier image produced almost eighty years prior during Alexander von Humboldt’s Orinoco expedition (see p. 246).9 These nocturnal forest scenes delight in the campfre, the expedition team, the encampment, and, above all, the unseen nighttime jungle.

Like other travelers on the Orinoco, Morisot also appreciated the mystique of the river’s origins. Despite Chafanjon’s claims of success, he did not reach the Orinoco River’s source, but turned back due to low provisions just beyond the Guaharibo Rapids, which are located about ninety-three miles away.10 In fact, it was not until years later that a Franco-Venezuelan expedition reached the source of the Orinoco on November 27, 1951.11 The Chafanjon expedition’s hunt for the legendary origins of the Orinoco was shared by earlier European explorers as well as by the imaginations of later adventure writers who closely looked to Chafanjon’s narrative of his geographic exploration.12 Morisot’s two imaginary sketches of the river’s source, which draw on Chafanjon’s description, participate in the centuries-long captivation with reaching this elusive, virgin territory (see p. 247). Months earlier Morisot described in his travel diary how the river’s countercurrent conspired to keep its source hidden as it constantly pushed the travelers away.13 Aside from this bold quest, the greater part of the artist’s imagery and dutifully maintained travel diary reveal an empirical observer of life onboard, and along the Orinoco, carefully recording with admiration the colors, sounds, fragrances, landscapes, and peoples along the way (see p. 248).

Morisot’s travel diary provides information about his artistic production. While sometimes his written entries directly reference the activity of drawing or the making of specifc pictures, at other times they provide more general impressions of the expedition’s itinerary and timeline that loosely correspond to visual subjects.14 In the travel diary, Morisot brings to mind several of his atmospheric landscapes (see p. 149). The artist, for example, describes painting a watercolor of a “black and tragic” sky, and a “yellow ochre, the color of the earth” Orinoco River just before a thunderstorm.15 Morisot admired the French artist Francoise-Auguste Ravier (1814–1895), also born in Lyon, and praised him as the benchmark for capturing such dramatic landscape scenes in watercolor.16 In particular, Morisot’s pursuit of emotion and light efects in watercolors of sunrises and sunsets evoke Ravier’s example.

Morisot’s style of writing is visually descriptive and pictorial, sug-

gesting the vantage of an artist. In Caracas, for example, Morisot provides a somewhat poetic description of its environs: “Everything is yellow in this country: the dust, the houses, the inhabitants, the donkeys, the birds, the fowers, and the color of the fag, including the fever. Yellow is the dominant color, that of the dry, arid, sad earth and of the sun that gilds everything that it touches.”17 Similarly, Morisot’s description of a scene of multicolored birds recalls the canvas of a landscape painting: “Their brilliant colors mix with all the refnements of fowers on this verdant background.”18 Thus Morisot not only relates his own artistic production at stages of the journey, but several of his aesthetic descriptions of tropical American nature are painterly.

Morisot also relays the physical and moral strain of navigating the strong river as well as confronting perilous weather, hunger, mosquitos and insects, and recurrences of malaria.19 One can appreciate the remarkable fact that both Morisot and the greater part of his artistic output survived this risky expedition. In addition, the artist makes explicit in his travel diary the hindrance of painting under such uncomfortable circumstances.20 Morisot describes the challenge of drawing and painting a watercolor of a unique plant with its fowers while bitten by relentless mosquitos. To manage the discomfort, Chafanjon fans him while he works standing up over the course of an hour.21 Meeting other artistic challenges with resourcefulness, Morisot also describes drawing with “black smoke” (fumée noire), a mostly carbon pigment, to create botanical impressions on occasions when he is unable to render with other materials a plant in situ that would quickly wither if picked. He created 377 impressions using this technique and also collected a herbarium of 164 plants.22 Morisot artfully arranged the plant parts in various patterns in these botanical impressions (see p. 250).

Morisot’s Orinoco production ultimately reveals a close dialogue between his imagery and writing as well as a sensitivity to documenting Chafanjon’s proposed scientifc objectives in the study of the region’s populations and geography. Morisot’s comprehensive and earnest visual documentation of the Orinoco River through his travel diary, images, and maps is also illustrative of ongoing French artistic and scientifc interest in Venezuela, which attracted other notables such as Aimé Bonpland, Jules Crevaux (1847–1882), Camille Pissarro, and Jules Verne. Morisot’s diligent efort at recording his impressions of the Orinoco River echoes in its broad scope and empiricism the visual culture of earlier European expeditions. Yet rather than signal the end

of an era of exploration, the journey of Chafanjon and Morisot would continue to infuence later Orinoco adventurers.

1 Alvaro García Castro, “Estudio preliminar,” in Auguste Morisot, Diario de Auguste Morisot (1886–1887): La apasionante exploración de dos franceses a las fuentes del Orinoco, trans. Julieta Fombona and David Nevett (Caracas/Bogota: Fundación Cisneros/Planeta, 2002).

2 Martine Villelongue et al., Auguste Morisot (1857–1951) du Crayon au Vitrail (Lyon: Musée de Beaux-Arts de Lyon, 2012), 4.

3 Jean Chafanjon, L’Orenóque et le Caura: Relación de voyages executes en 1886 et 1887; contenant 56 gravures et 2 cartes (Paris: Hachette & Cie., 1889), 1. In 1888, the Paris Geographical Society awarded Chafanjon a gold medal for his survey of the Upper Orinoco. Luciana Martins, “Geographical Exploration and the Elusive Mapping of Amazonia,” The Geographical Review 102, no. 2 (April 2012), 225–44.

4 “A Special Study Exhibition on Auguste Morisot at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon,” The Art Tribune (January 8, 2012), http://thearttribune.com/A- SpecialStudy-Exhibition-on.html.

5 Photography was in its infancy in the decades after 1839, when Louis-JacquesMandé Daguerre announced the invention of the daguerreotype method. Rosa Casanova and Olivier Debroise, Sobre la superfcie bruñida de un espejo: Fotógrafos del siglo XIX (Mexico: Fondo de cultura económica, 1989), 24.

6 Morisot, Diario de Auguste Morisot, 440.

7 Ibid., 101.

8 Approximately a month earlier, Morisot described a meal preparation “in the picturesque Indian manner” and praised the astonishing deliciousness of the meal. Ibid., 178

9 The print represents a nocturnal vision of hammocks being readied and an exotic feast of roasted monkey being prepared by Indians as Humboldt and Bonpland travel the Orinoco. Humboldt’s book Aspects of Nature, in Diferent Lands and Diferent Climates with Scientifc Elucidations (Ansichten der Natur: mit wissenschaftlichen Erläuterungen) (1805) also provides descriptions of the Orinoco River at night.

10 Frank Truesdale, History of Carcinology (Rotterdam and Brookfeld: A. A. Balkema, 1993), 63.

11 See Joseph Grelier, Aux Sources de L’Orénoque (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1954). Michel Vaissier, Un explorateur en Asie central: Chronique de la mission Chafanjon (Paris: Cheminements, 2005), 21.

12 In 1498, Christopher Columbus wondered if the Orinoco might be the biblical river that fowed out of Eden, when he wrote to the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. Brook Wilensky-Lanford, Paradise Lost: Searching for the Garden of Eden (New York: Grove Press, 2011), xv. Imagining other godsends, Sir Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) searched for the city of El Dorado as he set his course from the mouth of the Orinoco River. In 1800, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858) navigated the Orinoco River and its tributaries with the primary goal of fnding a link between the Orinoco and the Amazon River systems. Humboldt’s Orinoco expedition produced copious scientifc observations and

further refuted the myth of El Dorado. Jules Vernes’s (1828–1905) adventure novel The Mighty Orinoco (Le Superbe Orénoque), published just over a decade after Chafanjon and Morisot’s expedition, found inspiration in Chafanjon’s account L’Orénoque et le Caura, and examined searching for one’s own personal origins along the journey to the river’s source.

13 Álvaro A. García Castro, Auguste Morisot. Un Pintor en el Orinoco. 1886–1887 (Barcelona: Planeta, 2002), 215.

14 Morisot describes his drawing of a sugar mill Trapiche (June 13, 1886) in his travel diary. Morisot, Diario de Auguste Morisot, 203.

15 Ibid., 233.

16 Ibid., 224.

17 Ibid., 111 (my translation of the Spanish text).

18 Ibid., 69 (my translation of the Spanish text).

19 The artist also portrayed his convalescence in a drawing.

20 Morisot, Diario de Auguste Morisot, 235.

21 Ibid., 245

22 Ibid., 25, 187.

alicia lubowski- jahn

Auguste Morisot (1857–1951), France

Vieja Loca (Pterophyllum altum Pellegrin), 1886

Watercolor on paper, 23 × 31 cm (9 A⁄af × 12 C⁄af inches)

Auguste Morisot (1857–1951), France

Costus Scaber Ruiz & Pavon O C. Spiralis (Jacq.) Roscoe, 1886

Watercolor and pencil on paper, 47 × 31 cm (18 K × 12 C⁄af inches)

Artist unidentifed

Rapids of Maipure, 1886

Albumen photographic print, 11.8 × 17.4 cm (4 X × 6 Y inches)

Auguste Morisot (1857–1951), France

View of Carbet Where Christopher Columbus Disembarked, 1886

Pencil on cardboard, 4.5 × 10.9 cm (1 O × 4 E⁄af inches)

Auguste Morisot (1857–1951), France

Ceiba Trees, 1886

Pencil on paper, 22 × 30.4 cm (8 AA⁄af × 11 AE⁄af inches)

Auguste Morisot (1857–1951), France

Night in the Jungle, 1886

Watercolor and ink on paper, 9.7 × 16.1 cm (3 AC⁄af × 6 E⁄af inches)

Auguste Morisot (1857–1951), France

Discovery of the Origins of the Orinoco, 1886

Graphite on paper, 18.4 × 20.3 cm (7 N × 8 inches)

Auguste Morisot (1857–1951), France

Guahiba Indian Entwining the Leaves of a Palm, 1886

Graphite on paper, 16.8 × 10.7 cm (6X × 4C⁄af inches)

Auguste Morisot (1857–1951), France Sunset, 1886

Oil on canvas, 17.9 × 24.9 cm (7 A⁄af × 9 AC⁄af inches)

Morisot (1857–1951), France

Untitled, 1886

Monotype (fumée-noire impression) on paper, 47.7 × 62 cm (18 O × 24 G⁄af inches)

Auguste

selected bibliography

Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Burnett, D. Graham. Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Carrera, Magali M. Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Catlin, Stanton Loomis. “Traveller-Reporter Artists and the Empirical Tradition in Post-Independence Latin America” and “Nature, Science and the Picturesque” in Art in Latin America New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Darwin, Charles. The Voyage of the Beagle. New York: Penguin Classics, 1989.

Diener, Pablo, and Maria de Fátima Costa. Rugendas e o Brasil. 2nd edition. São Paulo, Brazil: Capivara, 2012.

Driver, Felix, and Luciana Martins, eds. Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Gerson, Denise, ed. Paradise Lost? Aspects of Landscape in Latin American Art. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami, 2003.

Humboldt, Alexander von. Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, during the Years 1799–1804.

Translated by Thomasina Ross. Vols. 1–2, London: H. G. Bohn, 1852. Vol. 3, London: H.G. Bohn, 1853.

. Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Translated by Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. Klonk, Charlotte. Science and the Perception of Nature: British Landscape Art in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Kricher, John. A Neotropical Companion: An Introduction to the Animals, Plants, and Ecosystems of the New World Tropics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Manthorne, Katherine. Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1870. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

Mitchell, Timothy F. Art and Science in German Landscape Painting, 1770–1840. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Nygren, Edward. Views and Visions: American Landscape Before 1830. Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1986.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 2008.

Rangel, Gabriela, ed. Unity of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas. New York: Americas Society, 2014.

Romero D., Rafael, Helga Weissgärber, and Alfredo Boulton. Ferdinand Bellermann: Diarios Venezolanos 1842–1845. Caracas: Caracas Fund, Museos Nacionales, Galería de Arte Nacional, 2007.

Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. . European Traveler-Artists in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Mexico City: Banamex, 1996.

Wilton, Andrew, and Tim Barringer. American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880. London: Tate Publishing, 2002.

indeX

Italicized page references indicate illustrations.

Academy of Drawing and Painting (Caracas), 23

Academy of Fine Arts (Rio de Janeiro), 23, 30, 206, 216

Academy of San Carlos (Mexico City), 22, 50, 178

ahuehuete trees, 178, 179

Álbum de trajes chilenos (magazine), 114

Allgemeine Geographische Ephemeriden, 238

Amazon River, 15

Andes: Argentinan landscapes, 158, 161, 162, 163; botanical tables on plants of, 29, 167, 167; Ecuadorian mountain landscapes, 146, 147; expeditions to, 20, 25, 141; geographic descriptions, 141; infuential landscapes of, 29, 141, 148, 150, 156, 194; landscape convention development, 17–18, 29; Peruvian mountain landscapes, 148, 149, 156, 157; publications on, as landscape infuences, 15; Venezuelan mountain landscapes, 142, 144–45, 154, 155, 193 anteaters, 43, 45

Arawaks, 92

Argentina: landscapes of, 118, 158, 161, 162, 163, 216, 217; politics, 116, 180, 202; urbanization vs. rural dichotomies, 20 armadillos, 43, 45

art academies and schools, 18, 21, 22–23, 66, 108, 116, 206, 216

Artist unidentifed: English Emigrants, 20, 116, 117; Glória Church, Rio de Janeiro, 112, 113; Lima and the Port of Callao, 20, 21, 136, 137; Rapids of Maipure, 238, 243; View of Havana, 126, 128 art nouveau, 238

Aspects of Nature (Humboldt), 146, 167, 202

Asunción (Paraguay), 20, 116, 117

Ateneo de Caracas exhibition, 72

Atlas of the Physical and Political History of Chile (Gay), 114

Austen, Sir Francis William, 66, 69

Barlaeus, Caspar, 41, 42

beauty as aesthetic convention, 18, 27, 28, 100, 142

Beckford, William, 96, 100

Bellermann, Ferdinand (Germany): biographical information, 29, 42, 66, 72, 142, 168, 209, 212; Guácharo Cave, 212, 214–15; At the Sugar Mill, 209, 211; Urao Lagoon, Venezuela, 142, 144–45

Bello, Andrés, 20

Benjamin, Walter, 39

Bentley, Charles (United Kingdom), 17, 226. See also Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana

Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Kant), 26–27

Berg, Albert (Germany), 29, 168; Palms, Bamboo, and Tropical Foliage, Colombia, 168, 170; Palms, Bamboo, and Tropical Foliage, Colombia , 168, 171

Bierstadt, Albert, 50

“The Big Bear of Arkansas” (Thorpe), 184 birds, 124, 125, 172, 174–75, 194, 198, 239

Blanes, Juan Manuel (Uruguay), 17, 180; En el Estrecho de Magallanes, 118; Marina del Sur, 118, 119

Blue Hole Estate, Jamaica, 87, 88–89

Bohls, Elizabeth A., 100

Boime, Albert, 20

Bolívar, Simón, 20, 141, 218

Bolívar Peak, 154, 155

Bonpland, Aimé (France): botanical publications by, 29, 30, 30, 167, 167; expeditions of, 141, 212, 239; as infuence, 20

Borget, Auguste (France), 158–59; Convent on Morro dos Sinais at Rio de Janeiro, 158, 160; Near Mendoza , 158–59, 161; Near Mendoza , 158–59, 162; Wooded Landscape, 158, 163 botanicals: of Brazil, 42; of Colombia, 168–69, 170, 171; of Cuba, 176, 177; expeditions for study of, 167, 227, 238; of Mexico, 178, 179; natural science studies of, 20, 25; of Orinoco River Delta, 238, 239, 242, 245, 250; of

Paraguay, 180, 181; popularity of, 20, 227; publications on, 29, 30, 30, 167, 167, 168; specimen collection methodology, 172; of Venezuela, 172, 173, 174–75

Boulton, Alfredo, 209, 212

Bouquet, Louis: Physical Table of the Equinoctial Regions, engraving with watercolor by, 167

Boydell, Josiah, 18, 26

Brambila, Fernando: View of Buenos Aires, 26; View of Lima from the Bullring Surroundings, 26 Brazil: art academies and schools in, 22–23, 206, 216; artist residencies, 21–22, 41, 206; diplomats to, 58; early landscapes of, 15, 18, 33–39, 35, 36, 37, 41–43, 44, 45; exhibitions and expositions, 22; expeditions to, 15, 25, 29, 41, 134, 204; hummingbird studies, 22, 194; landscape genre development, 30–31, 33–39; landscape genre popularity in, 22; landscape jungle scenes, 29, 29; landscape lake scenes, 197, 198; landscape photography, 221, 223; landscape river scenes, 35, 35–36, 193, 204, 205; landscapes with cows, 206, 207; landscapes with human fgures, 194, 195, 197, 199, 204, 205, 233; landscapes with religious narratives, 34, 36; native artists from, 17, 216, 221; politics, 17, 18, 116, 134, 138, 180, 204; ports and harbor scenes, 20, 138, 139; publications on, 15, 21; slavery, 43, 134, 135, 204, 227; urbanization vs. rural dichotomies, 20, 108. See also Rio de Janeiro

bromelia fower, 43, 45

Brownell, Charles de Wolf (United States), 17, 126, 176; Havana Bay, 21, 126, 127; Jagüey Tree, Male or Female, 176, 177

Brüggemann, Joseph (Germany): View of the Old Town of Desterro, Santa Catarina, Brazil, 20, 138, 139

Burchell, William John (United Kingdom): On the River, Near Santos, Brazil, 193, 204, 205

Burke, Edmund, 18, 26–27, 27, 221, 226

Bush, Norton (United States): biographical information, 17, 90, 156, 200; The Heart of the Peruvian Andes, 156, 157; On the San Juan, 200, 201

cacti, 35, 49, 57, 62, 63, 90, 91, 115, 142, 144–45, 167

“Café del Ávila” exhibition, 124 California, 90, 107, 136, 156, 200

Callao (Peru), 20, 21, 136, 137

Canta, F. de: Humboldt on the Orinoco, 16 Cape Horn, 26, 29, 136, 156 caprices, 34–39

Caracas (Venezuela): art academies in, 23; as landscape location, overview, 65; landscapes and cityscapes of, 65, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74–75, 79, 83; museum construction in, 72; ports and harbor scenes of, 21, 122, 123; travel narrative descriptions of, 239

Caribbean: landscapes, 87, 88–89, 103, 104–5; overview and history, 85–86, 90; ports and harbor scenes, 85, 92, 93, 94, 95 See also Cuba; Jamaica Caribs, 86, 92

Carúpano (Venezuela), 172, 173, 174–75

Carus, Gustav, 34 Cathedral of San José, 124, 125

Catherwood, Frederick (United Kingdom): biographical information, 17, 21, 183, 188; Castle at Tuloom, 188, 191; Gateway, Casa de Gobernador, Uxmal, 183, 183, 188, 191; Gateway at Labnah, 188, 191; Landscape with a Mayan Ruin, Mexico, 188, 189; Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, 183, 183, 184, 188, 190, 191, Well of Bolonchen, 184, 190; Catlin, George, 126, 176 cattle, 90, 91, 103, 105, 158, 161, 202, 203, 206, 207, 218, 219 caves, 124, 212, 213, 214–15 ceiba trees, 238–39, 245

Chafanjon, Jean, 17, 238–40

Chaimas, 212 Chalcatzingo (Mexico), 58, 59

Chapman, Conrad Wise (United States): biographical information, 17, 20, 29, 49, 62; The Valley of Mexico, 62, 63, 193

Chapultepec Forest, 178

Charton de Treville, Ernest (France): biographical information, 132, 136, 202; Guayaquil, 21, 132, 133; The Road from Valparaíso to Santiago, 193, 193 (detail), 202, 203

Chichén Itzá (Mexico), 184, 186 Chile: art academies and directors in, 108; landscapes with travel themes, 193, 202, 203; nationalist themes, 31; politics, 202; ports and harbors of, 21, 114, 115

Chilean Beaux Arts Academy, 108 Chimborazo, 141, 150, 153, 167

Christian VIII, King of Denmark, 87 Church, Frederic Edwin (United States): art style, 29, 50, 141, 146, 202; art subject preferences, 141, 178; associates, 87, 122, 146, 194; botanical descriptions and subjects, 15, 17, 146, 150; exhibitions, 18, 141; as infuence, 23, 148, 150, 156, 200; infuences on, 20, 29; travels, 17, 87, 122, 141, 146; The Andes of Ecuador, 150; Cotopaxi, 23, 146, 147, 148, 193; The Heart of the Andes, 29, 141, 148, 150, 156, 194; Landscape in South America, 87 Ciccarelli, Alessandro (Italy): View of Rio de Janeiro, 23, 108, 110 civilization, 17–18, 20–21, 42, 146, 221 Civilization and Barbarism (Sarmiento), 20 Clarac, Count de (France): Virgin Forest of Brazil, 29, 29

Claude Lorrain, 15, 18, 22, 49, 85, 87, 132, 212 Cleenewerck, Henry (Belgium): An Extensive Cuban Landscape, Cattle Watering at a Pool in the Foreground, 90, 91 Codex Badiano, 167

Codina, Joaquim José, 25 Coignet, Julies Louis Philippe (France): European Travelers Ambushed in a Forest, 21, 22 Cole, Thomas, 15 Colombia, 15, 17, 58, 168, 169, 170, 194 colonialism, 18, 20, 26, 100, 138, 180. See also independence Colt, Samuel, 176 Columbus, Christopher, 15, 92, 156, 167, 238, 244

Condamine, Charles Marie de la, 141 Constable, John, 15 Corcovado, 108, 110, 111

Cordillera de la Costa, 66, 68

Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 15

Corrêa do Lago, Pedro and Bia, 41, 42, 43

Cortés, Hernán, 15, 58, 156, 178

Cosmos (Humboldt), 30, 142, 146, 156, 167, 202

costumbrista scenes, 20, 23, 74, 116, 136, 146, 158, 202

Cotopaxi, 23, 141, 146, 147, 193

Courbet, Gustave, 202 creolization, 86 crosses, 146, 147

Cuba: art academies and schools in, 23; botanical landscapes, 176, 177; motivation for travel to, 176; politics and independence, 90; ports and harbor scenes, 21, 126, 127, 128; rural vs. urbanization themes, 21; sugar plantation landscapes, 90, 91; US foreign policy and occupations in, 86

Dale, John B. (United States), 108, 112; Rio, 112, 113

Darwin, Charles, 141

David, Jacques-Louis, 206

Debret, Jean-Baptiste, 22–23, 134

De León: Port of La Guaira, 107, 107

Desterro (Santa Catarina Island, Brazil), 20, 138, 139

Diario de viaje por la América del Sud (Pallière), 216

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 15

The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (Raleigh), 226

Dutch West Indies Company, 41, 43

Eckhout, Albert, 20, 41

Ecuador: American art infuences on, 23; botanical tables on plants of, 29, 167, 167; geological exploration and interest, 20; mountain landscapes and volcanoes of, 141, 146, 147, 150, 153, 167; native painters from, 23, 146, 193; politics and infuence, 146; ports and harbor scenes, 132, 133

Eden, 35, 42, 108, 150, 156, 176, 238

Egerton, Daniel Thomas, 58

Eikones (Philostratus), 37–38

El Dorado (myth), 226–27, 232

Ender, Thomas (Austria), 28, 134; Rio de Janeiro, 134, 135

Engelmann, Godefroy, 21

Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro (Cuba), 23

Essay on the Geography of Plants (Humboldt and Bonpland), 29, 30, 30, 167, 167

Essay on the Picturesque (Price), 18 European traditions: Dutch infuences, 30, 34, 36, 42, 43; French infuences, 15, 49, 85, 87, 132, 206, 212; Italian infuences, 34, 116, 120; neoclassicism, 23, 116, 120, 158, 206; for unfamiliar geography, 142

Ferguson, Henry Augustus (United States), 17, 22, 148; Morning in the Peruvian Andes, 148, 149 Ferreira, Alexandre Rodrigues, 25 Ferrez, Marc (Brazil), 17, 22, 221; Tijuca Falls, 221, 223 Filippea (Brazil), 42 Fillmore, Millard, 103

First Exhibition of Venezuelan Fine Art, 124 fsh, 238, 241 fags, ship, 21, 107, 108, 116, 129 famingos, 44, 172, 174–75 Fletcher, James Cooley, 194 Fortaleza del Real Felipe, 136 foundation, double, 35–37 frailejón, 154, 155 Frans Post (1612–1680): Complete Works (Corrêa do Lago), 41, 42, 43 Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, 42 Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, 142, 197, 209

Free School of Drawing and Painting, 23 Freire, José Joaquim, 25 French Artistic Mission, 22, 206 Freud, Sigmund, 35, 36 Friedrich, Caspar David, 34, 212 Frond, Victor, 221 fumée noire, 239, 250 Funck, Nicolaus, 212

García Márquez, Gabriel, 15 gauchos, 118, 202, 203, 216, 217 Gay, Claudio, 114 gaze: founding vs. distant, 37–38; human fgures as viewer’s, 15, 16, 57, 88–89, 115, 128, 136, 137, 146, 147, 149, 154, 155, 189, 193, 199, 219, 220, 226, 229, 232, 235; landscape quietude and viewer’s, 42; magisterial, 20, 180 geology, 20 Georgics (Virgil), 20 Geroldt, Baron Federico von, 58 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 62 Gilpin, William, 27–28, 100, 142 Glissant, Edouard, 86 Glöckler, Ludwig, 209

Glória Hill (Rio de Janiero, Brazil), 112, 113 Gobelins Tapestry Manufactory, 21 Goering, Anton (Germany): biographical information, 28, 66, 124, 154, 172, 212; Carúpano, Venezuela, 172, 173; The Cordillera, Venezuela, with Travelers on a Road, 154, 155, 193; Flamingos in a Lake, Venezuela, 172, 174–75; A Guácharo Cave, Southeast of Caripe (Cueva Clara), 212, 213; View of Puerto Cabello, 124, 125

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 30

Golbery, Marie Philippe Aimé de, 21

Gold Rush, 90, 107, 136, 156

Gombrich, Ernst H., 23, 25

Goury, Émile (France): View of BasseTerre, Guadeloupe, 92, 93

Gros, Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis (France): biographical information, 29, 49, 58; Valley of Cuautla, 58, 59; View of Texcoco, 58, 60; The Volcanoes, 58, 61 Guácharo Cave, 124, 212, 213, 214–15

Guadeloupe (Lesser Antilles), 92, 93

Guayaquil (Ecuador), 21, 107, 132, 133

Guiana, 17, 20, 226–28. See also Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana

Haiti, 17, 69, 86, 92

Hakewill, James, 96

Havana (Cuba), 21, 23, 126, 127, 128

Heade, Martin Johnson (United States): biographical information, 17, 21–22, 156, 194; Sunset: A Scene in Brazil, 194, 195

Heine, Peter Bernard Wilhelm (Germany), 20, 103; Scene on Lake Nicaragua with Ometepe Island in the Distance, 103, 104–5

Hildebrandt, Eduard (Germany): biographical information, 168, 178, 197; Alexander von Humboldt in his Library, after, 27; A South American Landscape with Storks by a Lake at Sunset, 197, 198; Sunset over Pedra da Gávea, Rio de Janeiro, 20, 24 (detail), 193, 197, 199

Historia del Paraguay (Zeballos), 180

Historia general y natural de las Indias (Oviedo), 167

Hobbema, Meindert, 15

Hoefer, Aldof, 176

Holanda, Francisco de, 38

Hudson River School, 146, 148, 156

Huitzilopochtli (Mexican god), 49

human fgures: absence of, 42, 108, 206; battle references and llaneros, 218, 219, 220; for botanical scale

comparisons, 176, 177; as compositional contributions, 100, 107, 193, 194, 195, 226, 232; ethnic costumes, 136, 137, 154, 155, 184; expedition participants, 16, 193, 193, 202, 203, 212, 214–15; gauchos, 118, 202, 203, 216, 217; guides as, 146, 147, 193; local custom depictions, 62, 63, 248; overview, 193; patrons as, 114, 184, 186, 187; racial mixing, 92, 94, 107; realism of indigenous, 227, 227; for scale comparisons, 212, 214–15; self-portraits of artists as, 112, 113, 212, 214–15; slavery, neutrality of, 85–86, 100, 101, 134, 135; slavery abolition and heroism of, 194, 195, 204, 205; slaves, symbolism of, 90, 100, 107, 209; social class distinctions, 126, 221, 223; social class interactions, 92, 94, 107, 114, 115, 126, 202, 203; as subordinate accessories, 69, 70, 71, 74, 193; symbolism of, 108, 148, 193, 221, 223; traveling and mobility themes, 193; as viewer’s gaze, 136, 137, 146, 147, 154, 155, 193, 199, 226, 232 Humboldt, Alexander von (Germany): Andean mountains named after, 154, 155; artists infuenced by, 23, 58, 126, 134, 146, 156, 197; associates of, 20, 29, 56, 142, 168, 209, 212; Berg’s catalogues with letter passages from, 168; botanical essays by, 29, 30, 30, 167, 167; botanical interests of, 178; botanical texts by, 146, 167, 202; cave explorations, 124, 212; death of, 141; El Dorado myth, 226; expeditions of, 141, 239; geographical texts by, 15; illustrated albums of, 17, 27, 28, 28–29, 141; illustrations featuring, 27; landscape painting principles of, 27, 29–30, 142, 167, 168; landscapes featuring, 16, 212, 238, 239; Mexico City descriptions, 49; publications of, as landscape art infuence, 15, 29, 183, 202; science and nature treatises by, 30, 142, 146, 156, 167, 202; sketches by, embellished by printmakers, 17; volcano explorations and studies, 20, 29, 141, 150; Artemis of Ephesus, with Bonpland, 30, 30; Physical Table of the Equinoctial Regions, sketch by, 29, 167, 167; Tequendama Falls, 28, 28–29 Humboldt Peak, 154, 155 hummingbirds, 22, 194

Imperial Academy of Fine Arts of Rio de Janeiro, 22–23 imperialism, 18, 20, 180. See also colonialism

imperial picturesque, 90, 96, 100

Impressionism, 74, 148

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (Stephens), 21, 184, 188

independence: Argentina, 202; Brazilian, 204; Chilean, 114, 129; Cuban, 90; Ecuadorian, 146; Guayaquil, 132; Paraguayan, 116, 180; realism after, 202; and self-identity, 17–18; trade and commerce after, 107, 136; travel accessibility after, 15; Uruguayan, 118, 120; Venezuelan, 69, 218

The Indian Races of North and South America (Brownell), 126 industry, 20, 85, 126, 221. See also sugar plantations

Insfrán, Carlos Antonio López, 116

Irving, Washington, 156

Isabey, Eugène, 197

Iztaccíhuatl, 50, 53, 54–55, 56, 57, 58, 61

Jacquin, Nikolaus Joseph von, 167 jagûey trees, 176, 177

Jamaica: landscapes of, 21, 87, 88–89, 96, 98, 100, 101; ports and harbor scenes of, 96, 99; slave revolts in, 86; travels to, 122, 194

João VI, King of Portugal, 22, 206

John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen, 18, 21, 33, 41

Josephine, Empress of France, 206 Jovellanos, Salvador, 116

Juan Fernández Island, 129, 130–31

Kant, Immanuel, 18, 26–27

Kidd, Joseph Bartholomew, 96 Kidder, Daniel Parish, 194 Kritik der Urteilskraft (Kant), 18, 27

Krusenstern, Adam Johann von, 138

La Guaira (Venezuela): landscapes, 74, 76, 77, 122, 123; ports and harbor scenes, 66, 67, 68, 107, 107; travel account descriptions, 69, 72, 209

Lake Nicaragua, 20, 103, 104–5, 200 Lake Valencia, 172, 174–75, 218, 220 Landesio, Eugenio, 22, 29, 50, 178 landscapes, overview: art instruction for, 21, 22–23, 66; circulation of, 21–22; conventions for, 17–18, 26–27, 38, 100; early pioneers of, 15; individuality, expressions of, 29–30, 33; infuences on, 18, 20; invention and development of Americas, 33–39, 41–43; land versus sea subject preferences, 21; motivation

for, 15; narrative development, 35, 37–38, 39; natural science documentation using, 20; nature vs. civilization themes, 20–21; oldest known in Western tradition, 37–38; original vs. inhabited, 33; popularity of, 22, 148; publication embellishment practices, 17; purpose of, 17, 26, 37; realism challenges, 15, 17; symbolic language of, 25 Langsdorf, Georg Heinrich von, 29, 138 Lebreton, Joachim, 22–23, 206

Le Carbet (Martinique), 238, 244

Lerpinière, Daniel (United Kingdom): A View in the Island of Jamaica, of Part of the River Cobre near Spanish Town, after Robertson, 21, 96, 98 Lesser Antilles, 85, 92, 93 Liber Nauticus (Serre), 66 Libertador Castle, 124, 125

Liber Veritatis (Claude Lorrain), 18 Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Irving), 156

Lima (Peru), 20, 26, 129, 136, 137 Limeños, 136 Linnaeus, Carl, 167 lizards, 43, 44, 108, 110 llamas, 142, 144–45, 148, 149 llaneros, 218, 219 Loemans, Alexander François (Netherlands or France): Chimborazo, Queen of the Andes, 150, 153 London Zoological Society, 124 López, Cándido, 180

Lost Tribes of Israel, 183 Louis-Philippe, King of France, 21 Louis XIV, King of France, 21, 41, 132 Luminism, 194, 200

magisterial gaze, 20, 180

Maipure rapids (Orinoco River), 238, 243

Maiquetía River (Venezuela), 74, 80 malaria, 239

Malaspina, Alessandro (Malaspina Expedition), 25, 26, 26

Malosetti, Laura, 180 mangroves, 124, 125

Manifest Destiny, 18, 20, 156

Maria Leopoldina, Archduchess of Austria, 134 maritime subjects, 21, 26, 66, 69, 107, 108, 112. See also ports and harbors; seascapes Martinique, 238, 244 Martius, Carl Friedrich Philipp von, 15, 134; Vögel-Teich Am Rio de S. Francisco,

with Spix, 15, 15

Mason, James (United Kingdom): A View in the Island of Jamaica, of the SpringHead of Roaring River on the Estate of William Beckford Esqr, after Robertson, 21, 100, 101

Matanzas, 90, 91, 126

Mayan ruins, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191

Meiggs, Henry, 156

Melbye, Fritz George (Denmark): biographical information, 74, 75, 87, 94, 122; A Blue Hole, Jamaica, 87, 88–89; Of Caracas, Venezuela, 21, 122, 123; View of St. Thomas, West Indies, 87 Melikian, Souren, 42 Mendoza (Argentina), 158, 161, 162

Mérida (Venezuela), 154, 155

Methfessel, Adolf (Switzerland), 28, 180; Ipacari Lagoon Landscape, 180; Landscape, 180, 181

Metternich, Klemens von, Prince of Vienna, 134

Mexico: art academies in, 22; artist residencies in, 17; botanical landscapes from, 178, 179; international exposition participation, 22; Mayan ruins of, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191; native artists from, 17, 50; politics and independence, 202. See also Valley of Mexico

Michelangelo Bounarroti, 38 “Mi delirio sobre el Chimborazo” (Bolívar), 141 mimosas, 142, 144–45 modernity, 20, 90, 126, 132, 221 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 126 Monagas, José Tadeo, 69 Monroe Doctrine, 17, 86

Montevideo (Uruguay), 21, 120, 121 Montúfar, Carlos, 141 morality, 23, 38, 126

Morisot, Auguste (France): biographical information, 17, 238–40; Ceiba Trees, 238–39, 245; Costus Scaber Ruiz & Pavon O C. Spiralis (Jacq.) Roscoe, 238, 242; Discovery of the Origins of the Orinoco, 239, 247; Guahiba Indian Entwining the Leaves of a Palm, 239, 248; Night in the Jungle, 239, 246; Sunset, 239, 249; Untitled, 239, 250; Vieja Loca (Pterophyllum altum Pellegrin), 238, 241; View of Carbet Where Christopher Columbus Disembarked, 238, 244

Moritz, Carl, 212

Morrison, John, 17, 226 Moses (biblical character), 35 mosquitos, 239 mountains, 66, 68, 72, 73, 108, 110, 111, 134, 135 See also Andes; volcanoes Mount Ávila, 72, 73 Mt. Chachani, 156, 157 mules, 154, 155 Museo de Bellas Artes, 72

Napoleon, 206 nationalism, 17–18, 18, 30–31, 49, 118 natural sciences, 20, 25–30. See also botanicals; specifc types of fora and fauna naval art training, 21, 66, 112 neoclassicism, 23, 116, 120, 158, 206 Netherlands, 15, 18, 30, 33, 41, 42, 43, 107 Nicaragua, 103, 104–5, 200, 201 noche triste, 178

Norgate, Edward, 38, 39 Norman, Benjamin Moore, 183, 184 Nossa Senhora das Neves (Brazil), 42

Observations on the River Wye (Gilpin), 28 “Ode to Tropical Agriculture” (Bello), 20 Ometepe Island, 103, 104–5 on-site (in situ) production: as authenticity evidence, 96, 112; botanicals and requirements of, 239; plein-air painting, 15, 50, 58, 65, 96, 178; preliminary sketches, 148, 158, 180, 197, 209; selfportraits as authenticity claims of, 112 Origin of Species (Darwin), 141 Orinoco River Delta, 16, 17–18, 229, 238–40, 247, 248, 249, 250

El Orinoco y el Caura (Chafanjon), 238 Oviedo, Fernández, 167 oxen, 216, 217

Pallière, Jean-León (Brazil), 17, 180, 216; A Caravan of Gauchos and their Wagons Crossing the Pampas, Argentina, 216, 217 palm trees: character descriptions of, 168; compositional use of, 43, 132, 146, 147, 204, 205; as landscape embellishments, 87, 88–89, 200, 201; species identifcation and scientifc precision, 168, 170, 171, 180, 181; symbolism of, 62, 103, 150, 206

Pão de Açucar (Sugarloaf Mountain), 108, 110, 111, 134, 135

Paraguay, 20, 116, 117, 180, 181

Páramo of Mucuchíes, 154 patronage: botanical explorations, 172; commissions, 156, 200; human

fgures representing, 114, 184, 186, 187; landscape popularity, 22; for marketing purposes, 176; royal/state, 41, 134, 142, 197, 209; sugar plantation owners, 96, 100, 126, 176; for war history publication illustrations, 180 Pedra da Gávea (Brazil), 197, 199 Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil, 22–23, 134 Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, 22, 108, 194, 221 pelicans, 124, 125 Pellicer, Carlos, 50 Perry, Matthew Calbraith, 103 Personal Narrative (Humboldt), 146 Peru, 22, 136, 137, 148, 149, 156, 157, 183

Philip II, King of Spain, 42, 167

A Philosophical Enquiry (Burke), 18, 26–27, 226

Philostratus, 37–38, 39 photography, 22, 66, 141, 221, 223, 238, 243 Physiognomy of Tropical Vegetation in South America (Berg), 168 pictographs, 197, 226 picturesque: colonization and imperial, 90, 96, 100; description as aesthetic convention, 18, 27–31; human fgures and conventions of, 100; lack of, 50; Mayan ruins and imaginary embellishments, 184; purpose of, 142; with scientifc precision, 136, 141, 180, 226; strategies and elements of, 43, 108, 126, 132, 142, 150, 172, 202, 204; travel narrative illustrations criticized for, 184 Picturesque Illustrations of Buenos Ayres and Monte Video (Vidal), 120 picturesque voyages, 18, 21, 27 Pirara (Guiana), 226–27, 232 Pissarro, Camille (Virgin Islands): biographical information, 65, 74, 75, 87, 93, 94, 122, 239; Cove with Sailboat, 85 (detail), 94, 95; The Hacienda, 65, 74, 81; La Guaira, 65, 74, 76; Landscape, 65, 74, 78; Maiquetía River, 65, 74, 80; New Road, La Guaira, 65, 74, 77; Panoramic View of Caracas, 65, 74, 79; Pariata, 74, 82; A Plaza in Caracas, 65, 75, 83 Planchart, Enrique, 72 plantations, 221. See also sugar plantations plein-air painting, 15, 50, 58, 65, 96, 178 politics and power: as art infuence, 18, 20, 26, 69, 75; fags, symbolism of, 21, 107, 108, 116, 129; neutrality of, 87, 134; race/class mixing, 86, 92, 107; US foreign policy, 17, 18, 20, 86. See also colonialism; independence; slavery; trade and commerce

Popocatépetl, 50, 53, 54–55, 56, 57, 58, 61 Porter, Robert Ker (United Kingdom): biographical information, 218; The Lake of Valencia, 218, 220; Rounding Up Cattle on the Apurean Plains, 218, 219; Storming of Seringapatam, 218 Porto-Alegre, Manuel Araújo, 30–31 ports and harbors: Brazilian, 20, 23, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 117, 138, 139; Caribbean, 94, 95; Chilean, 21, 114, 115; Ecuadorian, 132, 133; Jamaican, 96, 99; overview, 21, 107; Paraguayan, 20, 116, 117; Peruvian, 136, 137; Robinson Crusoe Island, 21, 129, 130–31; Uruguayan, 21, 120, 121; Venezuelan, 66, 67, 68, 122, 123, 124, 125 See also seascapes

Portsmouth Naval Academy, 66 Portugal, 25, 107, 134, 204 Post, Frans (Netherlands): biographical information, 15, 18, 21, 30, 33–39, 41–42, 132; Brazilian Landscape with Manoah’s Sacrifce, 35, 36; Landscape with Chapel, 14 (detail), 40 (detail), 41, 42–43, 45; The River San Francisco and Fort Maurice in Brazil, 35, 35–36; View of Frederica City in Paraíba, 32 (detail), 41, 42, 43, 44; View of Olinda, Brazil, 36–37, 37 Poussin, Nicolas, 15, 49

Price, Uvedale, 18

print reproductions, 21–22, 85–86, 120 Puerto Cabello (Venezuela), 124, 125, 172, 209

Puerto Rico, 86

Quidor, John, 184

race relations, 86, 92, 107. See also slavery Raleigh, Sir Walter, 156, 226 Ralston, William C., 200 Ramblings in Yucatan (Norman), 183, 184 Rangel, Gabriela, 200 Ravenet, Juan Francisco de, 26 Ravier, Francoise-Auguste, 239 Realism, 156, 202, 227 Rembrandt van Rijn, 15 Rio de Janeiro (Brazil): art academies in, 22–23, 206, 216; descriptions of, 194; exhibitions in, 22; landscapes of, 20, 24, 28, 134, 135, 158, 160, 193, 197, 199; maritime commerce in, 107; population statistics, 112; ports and seascapes of, 21, 23, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 194

River Cobre (Jamaica), 96, 98 River Plate (Paraguay), 180 Robertson, George (United Kingdom):

A View in the Island of Jamaica, of Part of the River Cobre near Spanish Town, Lerpinière after, 21, 96, 98; A View in the Island of Jamaica, of the SpringHead of Roaring River on the Estate of William Beckford Esqr, Mason after, 21, 100, 101; Views in the Island of Jamaica series, 21, 96

Robinson Crusoe Island, 21, 129, 130–31

Romanticism: aesthetic conventions, 27–28; as artistic style, 34, 158, 204, 206; human fgure conventions in, 193; as landscape infuence, 15; as pre-independence style, 202; subjects popular in, 156

Rosa, Salvator, 15, 18, 212

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 206

Rousseau, Theodore, 132

Royal Geographic Society, 17, 20, 226–28

Royal Navy, 66, 69

Rubens, Peter Paul, 15, 18

Rückenfgur, 193

Rugendas, Johann Mortiz (Germany): art production, 49, 56, 108, 114; botanical interests of, 178; illustrated publications, 21, 168; infuences on, 29, 56, 168; political conficts and arrests, 56; residencies and local sales, 21, 114; travels, 29, 56, 114; View of the Valley of Mexico with Volcanoes and the Texcoco Lake, 56, 57; View of Valparaíso, 21, 114, 115

Rühs, Carl, 209

ruins, 21, 183, 183, 184, 186, 187

Ruskin, John, 126

Ruysdael, Jacob van, 33

Sabatier, Léon Jean-Baptiste (France): View of the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, 108, 111

Saint Domingue (Haiti), 86, 92

Salas, Antonio, 23, 146

Salas, Rafael, 23, 146, 147, 193

Salas, Ramón, 146

San Esteban (Venezuela), 209, 211

San Juan River (Nicaragua), 200, 201

San Martín, José de, 129, 202

Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 56

Santa Catarina (Brazil), 138, 139

Santa María de Tule (Mexico), 178 Sarmiento, Domingo, 20

Schetky, John Christian, 66

Schick, Christian Gottlieb (Germany): Nocturnal Scene of Alexander von Humboldt on the Orinoco, 238, 239 Schomburgk, Robert Hermann (United Kingdom): abolition campaigns, 227;

botanical specimen collections, 20, 227, 227, 228; expeditions led by, 17, 20, 226–28; illustrated publications of (See Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana)

Schönberger, Lorenz: Physical Table of the Equinoctial Regions, drawing by, 167, 167

School of Engraving (Mexico City), 22 sea grape trees, 92, 93

seascapes: artwork featuring, 66, 67, 68, 118, 119, 122, 123; overview, 21, 107; purpose, 26, 69, 107; sublime characteristics used with, 108, 118, 132. See also ports and harbors

Selectarum stirpium Americanarum Historia (Jacquin), 167 self-portraits, 112, 113, 212, 214–15

Serre, Dominic, 66

Seutter, Matthäus: Novus Orbis sive America, 19

Sèvres dinnerware, 21

Seymour, Sir Michael (United Kingdom): biographical information, 65, 66, 69; Approaching La Guaira, Venezuela, 66, 68; City of Caracas from the Chacou Road, 69, 70; La Guaira, Venezuela, 66, 67; Market Place, City of Caracas, Venezuela, 69, 71

Siegel, Anton (Austria): View of the Port of Montevideo, 21, 120, 121

Skelly, Francis (United Kingdom): A View of Port Royal and Kingston in the Island of Jamaica, 96, 99

slavery: abolition of, 100, 134, 194, 204, 227; Brazilian raiding practices, 227; Guadeloupe statistics and demographic comparisons, 92; neutrality and detoxifcation of, 85–86, 87, 108, 109, 134; slave revolts, 86; sugar plantations and, 90, 91, 100, 101, 134, 135, 209, 211

Sousa Leão, Joaquim de, 41, 197

Spain: art academy staf from, 22; colonial occupations of, 49, 92, 120, 132, 178; conquistador imagery, 218; expeditions sponsored by, 25, 26; global trade and commerce, 107; independence wars against, 90, 120, 129, 218; Mexican conquests and legends, 178 Spence, James Mudie, 124 Spix, Johann Baptist von, 15, 134; VögelTeich Am Rio de S. Francisco, with Martius, 15, 15

Squier, Ephraim George, 103 Saint Thomas (Virgin Islands), 79, 85, 87, 94, 95 stafage, 108, 184, 193, 202. See also human

fgures

Stahl, Augusto, 221

Stephens, John Lloyd: expeditions led by, 17, 183, 188; travel narratives of, 21, 183, 183, 184, 188, 190, 191 storks, 198

Stuart, Sir Charles, 204

sublime: contradictions to, 194; description as aesthetic convention, 18, 27, 28; emotional quality as characteristic of, 18, 25, 26, 27, 142, 188, 194; European traditions and use of, 212; lack of, 50, 72; landscape characteristics of, 58, 118, 142, 148, 156, 188, 194, 212; nationalist connotations, 31; philosophical studies on, 18, 26–27, 226; seascapes characteristics of, 108, 118, 132; viewer’s gaze contemplating, 42, 193; waterfalls as subjects of, 221 Sugarloaf Mountain (Pão de Açucar), 108, 110, 111, 134, 135 sugar plantations: industry and importance of, 21, 90; patrons as owners of, 126, 176; slavery on, 85–86, 90, 91, 96, 98, 100, 101, 134, 135, 209, 211

Systema naturae (Linnaeus), 167

Tacubaya (Valley of Mexico), 50, 52

tapestry designs, 21

Taunay, Nicolas-Antoine (France): biographical information, 22–23, 206; Cascatinha Tijuca, 206; View of the Road from the Quebra Chángala in the Alto da Boa Vista, 23, 206, 207

Tenochtitlán (Mexico), 49

Teresa Cristina, Empress of Brazil, 108 Texcoco and Texcoco Lake, 49, 50, 53, 56, 57, 58, 60

Thoreau, Henry David, 156

Thorpe, Thomas Bangs (United States): The Pyramid at Uxmal, 184, 187, 193; The Temple at Chichén-Itzá, 184, 186, 193

Tijuca Falls, 221, 223

Tijuca Forest, 197, 206, 221

Tovar y Tovar, Martín (Venezuela), 17, 18, 72; Landscape of Caracas: View from Anauco, 65, 72, 73

trade and commerce: landscape genre infuenced by, 90, 126, 156, 175, 176, 200; shipping routes, 26, 136, 156; themes and symbols of, 21, 107, 108, 112, 129, 132. See also ports and harbors travel reporters, artists as, 103 Turner, J. M. W., 15, 197, 204

Turpin, Pierre: Physical Table of the

Equinoctial Regions, drawing by, 29, 167, 167

Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana (Schomburgk and Bentley): artists for, 17, 226; audience, 226; cover and frontispiece, 20, 227, 227–28; descriptions, 226–28; Ataraipu or the Devil’s Rock, 235; Brazilian Fort St. Gabriel, on the River Negro, 233; Caribi Village Anai, Near the River Rupununi, 232; Christmas Cataract, on the River Berbice, 233; The Comuti or Taquiare Rock, on the River Essequibo, 226, 230–31; Esmeralda on the Orinoco. Site of a Spanish Mission, 229; Map of Guayana to Illustrate the Route of R. H. Schomburgk Esq., 228, 237; Pirara and Lake Amucu, The Site of El Dorado, 226–27, 232; Roraima, A Remarkable Range of Sandstone Mountains in Guiana, 236; Watu Ticaba, a Wapisiana Village, 227, 234

Ulloa, Antonio, 141

United Kingdom, 17, 20, 69, 116, 227 United States, 17, 18, 20, 86 urbanization, 20–21, 42, 108 Uruguay, 17, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 180 Utatlan (Mexico), 188, 189 Uxmal (Mexico), 183, 184, 187

Valley of Mexico: as landscape location, overview and history, 49, 50, 58; landscapes of, 50, 51, 52, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63; mountain landscapes, 50, 54–55, 56, 57, 58, 61

Valparaíso (Chile): art instructors in, 129; artist residencies in, 114, 132; landscapes, 193, 202, 203; ports and harbors, 21, 107, 114, 115, 136 veduta, 120

Velasco, José María (Mexico): biographical information, 17, 18, 22, 29, 49, 50, 178; Ahuehuete, 178, 179; Ahuehuete and the Noche Triste (Popotla), 178; Valley of Mexico, 50, 54–55; Valley of Mexico from La Viga, 50, 51; View of Tacubaya, 50, 52; Waterspout from Lake Texcoco, 50, 53

Venezuela: art academies and schools in, 23; artist residencies in, 94, 122, 209; botanical watercolors, 172, 173, 174–75; cityscapes, 65, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 83; descriptions of, 209; diplomats to, 218; exhibitions of art of, 124; expeditions to, 124, 142, 172, 197, 209, 238, 239; fauna descriptions, 239; as landscape location,

overview, 65, 239; landscapes, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82; landscapes with caves, 124, 212, 213, 214–15; landscapes with human fgures, 154, 155, 193, 193, 209, 211, 218, 219; mountain landscapes, 142, 144–45, 154, 155, 193; native artists from, 17, 18, 72; political conficts, 69, 218; ports and harbor scenes, 66, 67, 68, 107, 122, 123, 124, 125

Vermany, Jean Baptiste, 23

Vermeer, Johannes: View of Delft, 33, 33, 42 Vernet, Joseph, 132

Victoria, Queen of England, 20, 69, 227

Vidal, Emeric Essex, 120

Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America (Catherwood), 183, 183, 184, 188, 190, 191

Views of the Cordilleras (Humboldt), 17, 27, 28, 28–29, 141

La Viga, Valley of Mexico, 50, 51 Villanueva, Carlos Raúl, 72

Virgil, 20

Virgin Islands, 79, 85, 87, 94, 95 volcanoes: Andean, 20, 29, 141, 146, 147, 150, 153; Caribbean, 103, 104–5; expeditions to, 58, 141; as geological interest, 20; Mexican, 50, 53, 54–55, 56, 57, 58, 61; mythology on, 146; popularity of, 56; as subject of sublime, 18, 29 Von tropische Tiefande zum ewigen Schnee (Goering), 124

Voyage pittoresque au Brésil (Rugendas), 21

Wadsworth, Daniel, 176 wagon caravans, 216, 217 wallpaper designs, 21 Wanderbilder aus Centralamerika (Heine), 103

War of the Triple Alliance, 116, 180 waterfalls: landscape paintings of, 87, 88–89, 150, 153; landscape photographs of, 221, 223; landscape prints of, 28, 28; for picturesque/sublime efects, 18, 25–26, 28, 31, 150, 180; symbolism of, 221 water lilies, 20, 227, 227, 228

West, Benjamin, 218

Wood, W. (United Kingdom): View of the City of Caracas from the Calvary, 65, 65

Wood Taylor, Charles Chatworthy (Carlos Wood) (United Kingdom): Town of Juan Fernández, Cumberland Bay (Juan Fernández Island), 21, 129, 130–31

Zeballos, Estanislao S., 180

Zoological Society of London, 172 zoology, 20, 25