Configuring Latin America: the views by Rugendas and Marianne North

Vera Beatriz Siqueira 

SIQUEIRA, Vera Beatriz. Configuring Latin America: the views by Rugendas and Marianne North. 19&20, Rio de Janeiro, v. X, n. 2, jul./dez. 2015. https://www.doi.org/10.52913/19e20.X2.09b [Português]

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The tropics of Rugendas 

1.      When the young painter of battles Johann Moritz Rugendas came to Brazil in 1821, he had just graduated from the Munich Academy and had no professional experience. He followed the footsteps of other naturalists and artists who had opened the doors of the New World to Europe. The turning point in his career was his hiring as the draftsman of the scientific mission of Baron Langsdorff, Consul-General of the Russian Empire in the country [Figure 1]. During this mission, and later on his own, Rugendas dedicated himself to documenting Brazilian nature and culture. Back to Europe in 1825, with the enthusiastic support of his compatriot Alexander Von Humboldt, he published his monumental book Viagem pitoresca ao Brasil (Picturesque trip to Brazil) in Paris. The first edition, available upon request, was an immediate publishing success in 1827, encouraging Rugendas to become the illustrator of life in Latin America. 

2.      The conversion of his drawings into lithographs probably led him to realize how much he still had to learn in order to cope with the illustrative task. Artists who lithographed his boards, such as Richard Bonington, a friend of Delacroix’s, or Jullian Vallou de Villeneuve, a pupil of Millet’s, may have revealed to him new trends art was taking and modern taste. Bonington produced one of the most romantic boards for his book Entrada da Baía do Rio de Janeiro (Mouth of the bay of Rio de Janeiro), with the support of a descriptive hard pencil drawing of the Sugar Loaf Mountain, turned into the scene of a tropical storm, with boats inclined by the force of the wind, and rough skies and sea. Villeneuve transformed the sketch of a cave made by Rugendas [Figure 2] in a scene marked by mystery, by the contemplative isolation of the traveler and the game of light and shade (Caves near San Jose) [Figure 3]. 

3.      Therefore, before returning to the continent, Rugendas remained in Europe, studying in Paris and Rome. The invaluable information about Latin America which he had gathered thanks to his proximity to Humboldt added to the further development of his rigid academic education. His intention was to publish an encyclopedic and artistic work about the continent. Thus, his journey started in 1831, with a trip to Mexico; from 1834 to 1844 he traveled to Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, and Bolivia; in 1845 he returned to Rio, where he stayed until 1846. Such a long journey, the longest held by an artist in Latin America, allowed for a very large thematic variety. 

4.      In Mexico, the first country visited by Rugendas, the trip was dedicated especially to natural views and landscapes, according to Humboldt’s recommendations [Figure 4]. With an encyclopedic understanding of nature, Rugendas creates images which are the physiognomic representation of the landscape, with topographical and botanical accuracy. He gradually moves away from the master's advice, especially one of them: "Avoid the temperate zones, Buenos Aires and Chile [...] Go where there are many palm trees, ferns, cactus plants, snow-capped mountains and volcanoes, go to the Andes Mountain Range [...]. A great artist like you must search for what is monumental".[1] 

5.      Rugendas visited the Andes and recorded its monumental nature. However, it is possible to note a significant change in his focus of attention during his eight years’ stay in Chile. Perhaps he was motivated by Humboldt's lack of interest in the landscape of the Latin American southern cone, but, also inspired by the liberal ideas of the Latin American personalities he made contact with, such as the Venezuelan Andrés Bello (editor of El Araucano magazine, who advocated for the opening for European culture and criticized the censorship by the Catholic Church). Rugendas set aside the topological description and the views in favor of recording indigenous people and scenes of everyday life. In the first works made in Brazil, like the ones Rugendas made in Mexico, the representation of customs and scenes of everyday life met, above all, the requirements of travel records and was subject to the naturalistic interest. But those made in Chile and later in Argentina and Uruguay had a new meaning. 

6.      This is what can be seen when comparing Costumes da Bahia (Costumes of Bahia - 1835, colored lithography) [Figure 5], made in Brazil, A rainha do mercado  (The queen of the market - oil, 1833 to 1835), made in Mexico [Figure 6], and O rapto de Trinidad Salcedo (The abduction of Trinidad Salcedo - 1836 painting, made in Chile [Figure 7]. The first scene has a strong documentary sense of the local population, described with the same detail and individuality as the plants that compose the natural scenario. The second one emphasizes the principles Rugendas had learned with European artists linked to the Barbizon landscaping, as the scene shows vividness and pictorial naturalism, although still showing a documentarian interest. The third scene has a literary inclination, and was probably made from oral and written reports of indigenous conflicts in bordering regions. The abduction of a woman by the Araucans is a recurring theme in his works in Chile. Rugendas adopts a literary approach to the theme, emphasizing the drama and incorporating elements of the romantic visuality.

7.      In Peru and Bolivia, the costumbrist theme attracted interest, but it is the monumentality of the colonial architecture and pre-Hispanic monuments that become important motifs. Of course this new interest, as it always happens with European artists in transit, comes already previously encoded. Peru, and more specifically its capital, Lima, was known in Europe for its luxury and wealth. Humboldt contradicted this mythical fame: "In Europe, Lima is described as a luxurious and magnificent city, with remarkable female beauties. I did not see anything like that."[2] But Rugendas seems to have been more impressed by the words of his friend, the artist Juan Espinosa, who having left Chile, settled in Arequipa, from where he wrote Rugendas long letters celebrating the originality of Peruvian architecture and customs. In the painting A Praça Maior de Lima (The Plaza Mayor of Lima) [Figure 8], the curiosity about the inhabitants and customs of that country – which led the artist to devote particular attention to garments and characteristic gestures of the local sociability - coexisted with the accurate representation of the cathedral in the background. The documentary intention also remains alive in the various drawings of archaeological and architectural themes made by the artist.

8.      In Argentina and Uruguay, the focus on everyday life scenes is renewed on the pampas. The contact he had had with Argentine scholars exiled in Chile - such as the diplomat Domingo del Oro, the poet Juan Godoy Guadalberto and the liberal Domingo Augusto Sarmiento – led Rugendas to the creation of a particular iconography to Argentina, where the gaucho was a prominent figure. His freedom was celebrated by Domingo del Oro in an article he sent to Rugendas in 1839: "A gaucho can live as he wants, working very little [...] He does not depend on anyone. His horse, his rope, his bola balls and knife are his only possessions and no obstacles prevent him from staying or going wherever wants. He is the freest soul of all."[3]

9.      The drawings and paintings with gaucho themes by the artist reveal extreme attention to detail. Even a painting as Boleando avestruzes (Catching ostriches), 1845-1846 [Figure 9], completed in Brazil, submits the dramaticity of the scene to a precise and capricious linearism, as if the mythical freedom of the gaucho had to be, at once, honored and contained by the descriptive strictness.

10.    Rugendas concludes his great American trip in Rio de Janeiro. Then, his task as an illustrator seems to have been fulfilled in his previous stay in Brazil, so the artist remains under the protection of the Court of Dom Pedro II and allowing him to exhibit his work at the Academy. His only drawings are panoramic views of the Guanabara Bay made on the day he had arrived in Rio, and a few landscapes of its surroundings. He dedicates himself to concluding unfinished paintings, treating them with a new romantic touch, which he exhibits with great success in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts Exhibition in 1845. Among these works was O retorno da cativa (The return of the captive woman), presented in the catalog as Retorno de uma mulher branca do cativeiro entre os indígenas (Return of a white woman from captivity among the indians). Despite this essentially descriptive title, Rugendas is praised by the director of the Brazilian Academy, Félix-Émile Taunay, "not by the colors or perhaps by the drawing correction, but by the grace [...] and above all by the high merits of the composition and expression, and the author's extreme sensibility regarding the balance of the bodies, the passions and the affections of the soul".[4]

11.    Between one of his first iconic images of the rainforest - Floresta virgem brasileira com grupo de figuras (Brazilian virgin forest with group of figures), 1830 [Figure 10] - and the figuration of the tropics which appears in the background of the portrait of D. Pedro II, 1846 [Figura 11], there is effectively a leap regarding not only the artist's trajectory and the incorporation of romantic pictorial issues, but also the visual configuration of the Latin American continent itself. With the proliferation of travel reports and the impressive dissemination of books, prints, drawings and panoramas that occurred in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the image of the tropics, to quote Nanci Stepan, was "tropicalized". In other words, the European public is less interested in accurate descriptions of the Latin American nature and geography than in the romantic experience of travels in the tropics, which confirms their feelings of estrangement, fear and surprise by creating images that are at the same time credible and mythical, real and fantastic.

Eden and Eros: Marianne North

12.    In her first novel, The Voyage Out, published in 1915, Virginia Wolf writes about Rachel Vinrace’s trip with her father from London to South America. When arriving at the fictional port of Santa Marina, where Rachel's aunt and uncle have a Villa, the British replicate in miniature the closed and immutable world of the aesthetic and moral traditions of their native country. However, this universe conflicts with the experience of displacement and alienation caused by a trip along the Orinoco River, moving up into the rainforest. At each stop of the vessel in small remote villages or improvised ports close to the jungle, the group is divided into smaller groups that follow trails in the forest.

13.    For the young and inexperienced Rachel, the journey is literally fatal. It leads her to find love, the discovery of which, in Woolf’s narrative, is associated with the vertigo caused by the overload of colors and shades of the tropical forest. Faced with the confusion and the immoderation of this double experience, Rachel will succumb. Affected by an unexplained illness, probably some of the little-known tropical diseases, she dies. At her funeral, only her lover seems to be devastated. Her family and friends comfort themselves with the conviction that their traditional values remain there, as a safe destination, the native England that they take with them everywhere and that can stabilize even the most radical or the darkest of experiences. 

14.    For Woolf, Rachel’s tragic fate represents the presumed future of women in general, in a society still strongly marked by Victorian traditions. And it was a particular woman who escaped this predetermined fate, among other figures of the time, who inspired the writer to talk about the transatlantic voyage: the artist and amateur naturalist Marianne North, whom Woolf knew well. Since 1882 the North Gallery had been open at Kew Gardens, in the outskirts of London, gathering copies of paintings of flora specimens from places all over the world where the artist had been. 

15.    In other of Woolf’s texts, there are more direct references to North’s naturalistic culture. This is the case of her last novel, Between the acts, in which she mentions the tree known as "monkey puzzle tree" or Araucaria imbricata, which became well-known when Marianne North, though ill, decided to go to Chile in 1884, with the sole purpose of representing it [Figure 12]. But it is certainly in a short story, Kew Gardens, written in 1919, that we find a central poetic convergence between Woolf and North. In the story, the writer describes the passage of four groups of people in front of a flowerbed on a July day in the famous botanical gardens of London. Woolf compares the irregular and random movement of visitors to the zigzag flight of butterflies or the slow and determined rise of a snail on the flowerbed. In the end, she extends her gaze and contrasts the flowerbed with the sounds and colors of the garden and the city in the background. The structure of the landscape composition, with a close foreground and a large and distant background is common to both artists, and reveals the relevance of the naturalistic culture in the creation of the visual and literary modernity [Figure 13]. 

16.    In the work of Marianne North, this narrative feature, recurrent in her paintings, is above all a starting point. Even before embarking on her trips around the globe, she intended to paint the tropical vegetation in situ, "in the place where they were, in their natural abundance and exuberance." In order to do so, she will pursue and find these tropics already visually configured as luxuriant, animating the geographical imagination of Europeans and leading a legion of explorers and amateur artists to the New World. North was different from most of them for her exclusive and diligent dedication to travel and to record nature in every continent. She never got married or had children. From 1869 on, with the death of her father, she used her own money to travel and build the gallery that bears her name in Kew Gardens [Figure 14]. At the time, this "temple of nature", as she liked to call it, was a must for scholars of various fields of expertise. Natural history was an important part of the culture of this period. And to some extent, the direct experience of intercontinental travel and the dissemination of her records were essential for the development of a modern and liberal England, open to the future.

17.    North’s work, however, was not easily classifiable. Many accuse her of not having any training - neither in art nor in natural history -, for doing an inadequate job both relating to the tradition of botanical painting and the tradition of fine art, uncomfortably placing her production halfway. Such discomfort would be clear even in the preface of the catalog of her own gallery, written by Sir Joseph Hooker, British botanist and explorer, director of the gardens. Committed to giving prominence to the instructive dimension of the images, he invites the public to see beyond the beauty of the paintings, focusing on the documentary data on the "wonders of the plant kingdom" that were subject to extinction due to the progress of civilization. 

18.    Inside the gallery, the geographical organization of the 832 paintings (there, arranged between 1882 and 1885) also seeks to emphasize their illustrative content. But the set of images, especially those of exotic plants, generates another kind of geography, more fanciful and poetic, which delimits along general lines the idea of a permanently exuberant and sensual tropical nature. Her travel itinerary shows us the desire to visit the so-called tropics: in 1871, in her first independent trip, she goes to North America, across the wild region of the United States and Canada. At the end of the same year, as she enthusiastically noted in her book, she goes to Jamaica, reaching the tropics she had long dreamed of: "Finally in the West Indies! Christmas Eve!".[5] 

19.    The following year, keeping to her plans to study tropical plants, she arrived in Brazil, where she stayed until 1873. In 1875, she began a trip around the world, stopping at Tenerife and then going to California, Japan, Borneo, Java, and Ceylon. She spent the whole year in India in 1878 and traveled to Australia and New Zealand in 1879. In 1883 she visited South Africa and from 1884 to 1885 she worked in Seychelles Islands and Chile. She gave up heading to Mexico due to health issues. She made a last stop in Jamaica, the origin and the end of her tropical experience. 

20.    Both in the written and the pictorial descriptions, we can see she was particularly committed to presenting tropical nature in its exuberance and sensuality [Figure 15]. In the book, she seemed delighted with the comprehensive and sensitive description of the window views from the rooms in homes, hotels, cottages. Treating them as landscape, she divided them, like Woolf, into a close foreground (giving the impression that we can even smell the flower or hear the insect buzz), a middle ground and a distant background. This compositional feature is recurrent in her work as a painter. North makes drawings and watercolors outdoors, finalizing them as paintings several times in her travel facilities or in her studio in England. In these works we can find some larger views and a great amount of representations of particular plants and animals contrasting with a wide and distant landscape.

21.    Her paintings with "close-ups" of plants, birds and insects [Figure 16] or a collection of flower pots with specimens generically called "wild", made in distant parts of the globe, reveal her imaginative geography of the tropics, which is not subject to the limits of physical geography. The contexts and environments of each of the places she visited do not seem to interest her, unless for some picturesque feature that can be added to her text or image. It did not matter to her if not all of these places belonged effectively to the tropics. Her logic was much closer to the generalist view, and why not say it, to the imperialist perspective of the British naturalists. 

22.    As already mentioned, in the course of the nineteenth century, the development of travel and of the technical means of production and distribution of their records resulted in the creation of a new kind of traveler, and of a new public for travel reports, which prioritized not only the scientific information on tropical nature, but also the aesthetic and poetic experience the images could offer. When arriving for the first time in the tropics, in Jamaica, North was delighted by the variety of tropical flora she sees from her window [Figure 17] and exclaimed: "I was in a state of ecstasy, and hardly knew what to paint first."[6]

23.    Her paintings were still certainly subject to scientific postulates, portraying the plants in their "habitat". But they should also dazzle the viewer, renewing the experience of wonder before the tropics. Therefore, her works in vibrant colors and somewhat rustic, with the paint often applied directly from the tubes to the support, refer not only to the typical colors of the tropics, but, before anything, to the enchantment they offer to the viewer, like the hummingbirds and butterflies, which add a new element of sensuality and eroticism.

24.    North sought and found in the tropics the exuberance, sensuality and exoticism the landscape of her homeland could not offer. But like her fellow citizens from Virginia Woolf’s novel, after each of her trips through the tropics, she returned to England where, finally, after completing her gallery, she devoted herself to her own house and garden in Alderley [Figure 18], writing: ”Nothing is as charming as life in the countryside of England, and no flowers are sweeter or more lovely than the primroses, cowslips, bluebells, and violets that grow in abundance all around me here."[7] However tragic, her illness, as unexplained as the fictional traveler Rachel Vinrace's, seemed to be the ideal fate for this amateur traveler (or travel lover), since it led to paroxysm the adventurous character of the romantic journey and the exuberant and exotic image of the Latin American region.

Bibliographic references

ADES, Dawn. Arte na América Latina. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 1997.

BANDEIRA, Julio. A viagem ao Brasil de Marianne North. Rio de Janeiro: Sextante, 2012.

DINNER, Pablo. Rugendas 1802-1858. Augsburg: Wiesner, 1997.

NORTH, Marianne. Recollections of a happy life: being the autobiography of Marianne North. London: Macmillan, 1892.

RUGENDAS, Johann Moritz. Viagem pitoresca através do Brasil. Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia; São Paulo: Edusp, 1989.

STEPAN, Nanci. Picturing tropical nature. London: Reaktion Books, 2001.

WOOLF, Virginia. Between the acts; Kew Gardens; The voyage out. Texts are available at leilabwww.24grammata.com. Last access on October 15, 2014.

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[1] Apud ADES, Dawn. Arte na América Latina. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 1997, p. 50.

[2] DINNER, Pablo. Rugendas 1802-1858. Augsburg: Wiesner, 1997, p. 51.

[3] Ibidem, p. 113.

[4] Ibidem, p. 117.

[5] NORTH, Marianne. Recollections of a happy life: being the autobiography of Marianne North. London: Macmillan, 1892, pp. 1-80.

[6] Ibidem, pp, 1-83.

[7] Apud BANDEIRA, Julio. A Viagem ao Brasil de Marianne North. Rio de Janeiro: Sextante, 2012, p. 17.