Chapter Four: Land as Resource

Brownlee, Peter John; Majluf, Natalia; Sullivan, Edward J.

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Chapter Four: Land as Resource

Peter John Brownlee and Natalia Majluf and Edward J. Sullivan

Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic

~~OVERVIEW
Centuries of extraction—of fur, timber, fish, precious metals and minerals, rubber, guano and an array of staple agricultural crops such as tobacco, sugar, coffee, cotton and cacao—had by 1800 left their mark on the physical landscape of the Americas...

Author

Peter John Brownlee and Natalia Majluf and Edward J. Sullivan

PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.132-177

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00273.005

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21843

Chapter subject tags:Landscape painting, AmericanNatural resourcesNationalismNational characteristics, CaribbeanLandscape painting, Latin American

Chapter Four: Land as Resource

OVERVIEW

Centuries of extraction—of fur, timber, fish, precious metals and minerals, rubber, guano and an array of staple agricultural crops such as tobacco, sugar, coffee, cotton and cacao—had by 1800 left their mark on the physical landscape of the Americas, but had not exhausted the continents’ vast resources.1See Steven C. Topik, “Coffee,” in The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequén, and Oil during the Oil Boom, 1850–1930, ed. Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998), 37–84; Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973, 1997). This becomes evident if one looks to the art of landscape painting as it emerged across the Americas during the nineteenth century. Paintings depicting lush forests, cultivated fields, rivers and streams, and plains populated by herds of cattle and sheep vividly document the natural beauty of spaces of extraction and production while emphasizing balance, abundance and future potential. Framed by European conceptions of land use and ownership and nourished by the pictorial lessons of painters Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, as well as by the aesthetic categories of the picturesque, the beautiful and the sublime, landscape painting in the Americas glorified and helped to facilitate the extraction of natural resources in pictures that accorded with the aesthetic tastes and the entrepreneurial spirit of the landowning classes.2On the historical alignment of landscape painting and the economic outlook of the landowning classes, see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). This view is taken up by several essays included in W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (Chicago/London:: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

These aesthetic categories also guided the practice and burgeoning industry of landscape tourism, which developed in tandem with and helped to encourage appreciation for landscape painting. Facilitated by the same rapidly modernizing modes of rail and steam travel that conducted natural resources from forests and fields to urban centers for production and distribution, landscape tourism cultivated aesthetic tastes in would-be patrons for pictures that commemorated the experience of ascending a mountain or witnessing the majesty of a rushing waterfall. The natural beauty of landscapes devoted to cultivation and extraction or set aside for leisure provided inspiration for artists, poets and travel writers. For many, these landscapes also provided spaces in which to commune with God and the divine. Along with paintings depicting such spaces, a spate of treatises instructed painters and their viewers in how to profitably extract pleasure or spirituality from the land’s natural beauty.

Making land available for the extraction of resources—whether to clear forests for agriculture or pasturage or to establish paths for nature tourism and rustic spiritual repose—was, however, premised on the removal of Indigenous inhabitants and the exploitation of menial labor, enslaved or otherwise. Both of these practices are notably absent in most landscape paintings, which readily document the outcome of, if not the actual processes involved in, creating and maintaining such beautiful spaces. Likewise, landscape painters tended to avert their gazes from scenes of the most devastating or labor-intensive modes of extraction, focusing instead on the creation of views of the productively cultivated landscape, which stressed balance and accord between the forces of nature and those of industry, order and progress.

If the teeming trees of the eastern forests of North and South America symbolized for painters and their audiences the sublimity of untouched wilderness, their removal heralded the advance of civilization. Depicting the lush forest and native hardwoods that are thought to have given Brazil its name, Henri Nicolas Vinet’s Cena na floresta da Tijuca (Scene at the Tijuca Forest) (see below) pictures a densely wooded area as a space to traverse, while Félix Émile Taunay’s painting Vista de um mato virgem que se está reduzindo a carvão (View of a Native Forest Being Reduced to Coal) (p. 154) collapses several stages in the timbering process into a single composition.3On timbering in Brazil, see Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Allan Edson’s 1868 Lumbermen on the Saint Maurice (fig. 1), set against the autumnal foliage of rural Quebec, illustrates the early stages of delivering cut timber from forest to mill.4J. Russell Harper, Krieghoff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 94. Art historian Marylin J. McKay points out that the subject of Canada’s natural wealth and timber resources became especially popular for artists following Confederation because “allusions to the extraction of wealth from the wild” in some way reinforced the purpose and strength of the new country. Marylin J. McKay, Picturing the Land, Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500–1950 (Montreal: McGill-Queen University Press, 2011), 147. The stumps of felled hemlock trees, employed in the tanning of leather, litter the sunken valley depicted in Sanford Robinson Gifford’s 1866 Hunter Mountain, Twilight (p. 41), a painting that elegiacally articulates the impact of clear-cutting near the artist’s home in upstate New York.5Hunter Mountain, Twilight was selected to represent the art of the United States at the 1867 Paris Exposition. The painting was purchased by James Pinchot, whose son, Gifford Pinchot, named for the artist, would later promote timber as a renewable resource as the first director of the United States Forestry Service. Kevin J. Avery and Franklin Kelly, eds., Hudson River School Visions: The Landscape Paintings of Sanford R. Gifford (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2003), 175–178. Likewise, Cornelius Krieghoff’s 1862 painting Sillery Cove, Quebec, which depicts the gathering of logs at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, represented Canada’s abundant resources in timber at the Paris Exposition. Arlene Gemacher, “Canada in Paris: Krieghoff at the Universal Exhibition 1867,” Journal of Canadian History 24 (2003): 23. For viewers in the twenty-first century, such images elicit an ambiguous response that juxtaposes recognition of a nineteenth-century sense of progress with a contemporary awareness of the environmental destruction that has resulted from deforestation.

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Description: Lumbermen on the Saint Maurice by Edson, Aaron Allan

FIG. 1 Allan Edson (born Stanbridge, Quebec, Canada, 1846; died Glen Sutton, Quebec, Canada, 1888), Lumbermen on the Saint Maurice, 1868. Oil on canvas, 58.5 × 101.5 cm (23 × 40 in). Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec, gift of Marian Ives. 1940.719. Photo by Brian Merrett, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

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Description: Scene at the Tijuca Forest (Cena na floresta da Tijuca) by Vinet, Henri Nicolas

Henri Nicolas Vinet (born Paris, France, 1817; died Niterói, Brazil, 1876), Cena na floresta da Tijuca (Scene at the Tijuca Forest), 1875. Oil on canvas, 65.5 × 100.7 cm (25.8 × 39.6 in). Collection of Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil. Coleção Brasiliana/Fundação Estudar, donated by Fundação Estudar, 2007. Photo by Romulo Fialdini.

Though rare in Canada and the United States of America, particularly after around 1800, bucolic portraits of farms and haciendas (plantations) figure prominently in the commissioned paintings of Mexico’s Eugenio Landesio and José María Velasco as well as Puerto Rico’s Francisco Oller y Cestero. Intended to represent both the land’s wealth and the owner’s wealth in the land, these images celebrate abundance and prosperity while minimizing signs of productivity.6This is not to say that plantations are entirely absent in the visual culture of the period. For an analysis of available images, see John Michael Vlach, The Planter’s Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Angela D. Mack and Stephen G. Hoffius, eds., Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, in cooperation with the Gibbes Museum of Art, 2008). In actuality, the cultivation of cash crops such as tobacco, cotton, indigo and coffee, one of South and Central America’s most pivotal commodities, required armies of workers along with the gentle sloping, rolling hills seen in Antonio Ferrigno’s A Florada (The Flowering) (fig. 2). This is one of six paintings commissioned by the Brazilian landowner and planter Eduardo da Silva Prates, Conde de Prates, to document the various processes involved in the cultivation and production of coffee at Prates’s Santa Gertrudes farm, which he owned from 1895 until his death, and to promote its commercial consumption.7As slavery waned in Brazil in the 1870s and 80s before finally being abolished in 1889, concerns lingered over the labor supply for coffee plantations. During these decades, planters increasingly employed free laborers—rural peasants, Italian and Portuguese immigrants—in the crop’s cultivation, eventually making wage labor more profitable than slave. Edwin Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 253. The six paintings depicting the Fazenda Santa Gertrudes, in today’s Santa Gertrudes, were sent by the Brazilian government to be presented at the St. Louis Universal Exposition in 1903. See Alexandre Luiz Rocha, “Fazenda Santa Gertrudes: Modelo de Produção Cafeeira no Oeste Paulista (1895–1930),” Ph.D. dissertation (São Paulo: FAU-USP, 2008), 161.

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Description: The Flowering (A Florada) by Ferrigno, Antonio

FIG. 2 Antonio Ferrigno (born Maiori, Italy, 1863; died Salerno, Italy, 1940), A Florada (The Flowering), 1903. Oil on canvas, 150 × 200 cm (59 × 78.74 in). Acervo Museu Paulista, Universidade de São Paulo. Photo by Hélio Nobre.

The open spaces of the plains and pampas of the Americas were central sites in the production of livestock as well as crops such as wheat and hay. The vast wheat-growing fields of Canada and the midwestern United States, and those of Chile and Argentina, provided for local consumption and export.8Jeremy Adelman, Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). The wide expanses of the plains in both North and South America were home to cattle industries for the export of beef, hides and tallow. Salt hay, gathered in the staddled stacks dotting the marsh paintings of Martin Johnson Heade, was a preferred cattle feed for nineteenth-century farmers. Flatness pervades Heade’s horizontally oriented landscapes (fig. 3) and those of Uruguay’s Juan Manual Blanes and Argentina’s Prilidiano Pueyrredón. Lacking dramatic mountains, rushing waterfalls or other points of focus, the neglected, negative spaces of the pampas enchanted and haunted the cultural imagination, while paintings of such spaces challenged the tenets of landscape painting itself.9For a sampling of culturally inflected analyses of such spaces, see Beatriz Rivera-Barnes and Jerry Hoeg, Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). See also Laura Malosetti Costa’s essay in this volume, pages 180–184. A pair of small panel studies of sunrise and sunset by Pueyrredón attests to this (figs. 4 and 5). Marking the intersection of productivity and aesthetic pleasure, the pair also utilizes the liminal passages between day and night to invoke the dichotomy of civilization (day) and barbarism (night) that animated national discourse regarding the fraught relationship between cities and hinterlands.10“After dark, the pampas become the domain of Pampas Indians, who had been sought out as allies in the struggle for independence, but became ‘fearsome and unknown’ enemies of the modern state. Lurking in this darkness was for Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and other writers that ‘dark and bastard heritage’ made up of indigenous societies, slave and ex-slave populations that seemed an obstacle to the aspirations of Europeanizing creóles.” Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 182. See also Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Civilization and Barbarism: Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga (1846), quoted in Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 183.

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Description: Newburyport Marshes: Approaching Storm by Heade, Martin Johnson

FIG. 3 Martin Johnson Heade (born Lumberville, Pennsylvania, United States of America, 1819; died St. Augustine, Florida, United States of America, 1904), Newburyport Marshes: Approaching Storm, c. 1871. Oil on canvas, 38.7 × 76.5 cm (15.25 × 30.13 in). Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, United States of America, Daniel J. Terra Collection. 1999.68.

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Description: Storm in the Pampa (Tormenta en la pampa) by Pueyrredón, Prilidiano

FIG. 4 Prilidiano Pueyrredón (born and died Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1823–1870), Tormenta en la pampa (Storm in the Pampa), undated. Oil on canvas, 22.6 × 66 cm (8.6 × 25.9 in). Museo Histórico de Buenos Aires “Cornelio de Saavedra.”

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Description: Sunset in the Pampa (Atardecer pampeano) by Pueyrredón, Prilidiano

FIG. 5 Prilidiano Pueyrredón, Atardecer pampeano (Sunset in the Pampa), undated. Oil on canvas, 22.6 × 66 cm (8.6 × 25.9 in). Museo Histórico de Buenos Aires “Cornelio de Saavedra.”

Just as the publications of Alexander von Humboldt established new ways of seeing and representing the landscapes of the Americas, painterly views of the natural world were also framed by the aesthetic treatises of William Gilpin and Edmund Burke, by Jean Baptiste Deperthes’s 1818 Théorie du Paysage and by popular travel books such as those Nathaniel Parker Willis published to great acclaim in the 1840s.11Nathaniel Parker Willis, American Scenery, or, Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature, vols. 1 and 2 (London: George Virtue, 1840); and Canadian Scenery, Illustrated, vols. 1 and 2 (London: George Virtue, 1842). Such views were also thoroughly modified by Charles Lyell’s 1830 Principles of Geology and similar texts that revised scientific understanding of the earth’s lifespan.12See Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (London: John Murray, 1830); and Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 181. On geology and its influence on U.S. landscape painting in the nineteenth century, see Rebecca Bailey Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Painters across the Americas, too, added their voices to this growing literature in a spate of treatises and instructional manuals. In the United States, Thomas Cole’s famed 1836 “Essay on American Scenery,” in which the painter likened nature to an “exhaustless mine,” and Asher B. Durand’s 1855 Letters on Landscape Painting extolled the virtues of nature and prescribed techniques for its proper representation.13See Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (January 1836): 1–12; and Asher B. Durand, “Letters on Landscape Painting,” in Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape, ed. Linda S. Ferber (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum of Art, in association with D. Giles Limited, 2007), 231–252. Likewise, Eugenio Landesio’s 1867 manual, La Pintura General o de Paisaje y la perspectiva en la Academia Nacional de San Carlos (General or Landscape Painting and Perspective in the National Academy of San Carlos), provided theoretical and practical frameworks for landscape painting in Mexico, while Antonio Smith’s break with the teachings of his mentor, Alessandro Ciccarelli, set the course for an anti-academic landscape-painting tradition in Chile.

Positioning themselves as interlocutors between nature and civilization and emphasizing their role as harvesters of the land’s natural beauty through the production of paintings, a number of landscape artists painted themselves into the scenes they depicted. Nicolau Facchinetti did so in his panoramic São Tomé das Letras (see Exhibition Highlights, below) as did Ciccarelli in his allegorical 1853 Vista de Santiago desde Peñalolén (View of Santiago from Peñalolén) (see Exhibition Highlights, below). Other artists inserted known public figures into their works: when Durand eulogized the passing of his mentor, Thomas Cole, in his 1849 Kindred Spirits (see below), he paired the painter with poet William Cullen Bryant, a friend of Cole’s, in a setting that amalgamates key sites in the Catskill Mountains made famous by Cole’s paintings. These images comment on the constructed nature of landscape painting itself, but they also served to establish authoritative or “officially” sanctioned views and cement artistic reputations.

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Description: Kindred Spirits by Durand, Asher Brown

Asher B. Durand (born and died Maplewood, New Jersey, United States of America, 1789–1886), Kindred Spirits, 1849. Oil on canvas, 111.8 × 91.4 cm (44 × 36 in). Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, United States of America. Photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In pictures depicting the nexus of wilderness and civilization, the beautiful and the sublime, nineteenth-century landscape painters foregrounded the land’s various resources. Evacuating these spaces of Indigenous peoples, glossing over the environmental impact of cultivation and extraction, and inserting evidence of their own painterly labor in place of that of slaves and other workers, the landscape paintings they produced converted raw materials into finished goods. Keyed to the development of emerging nations and national identities, as well as to commerce, such pictures also evidence shifting attitudes toward the land that would in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries evolve into the more ecologically conscious modes of environmental stewardship that frame contemporary views of land and its various uses.

Peter John Brownlee

CASE STUDY
On the Margins of Painting: Nature in the Andean Imagination, c. 1800–1900

In 1825, the Peruvian Congress decreed Peru’s official seal. It was divided into three fields, which showed a cornucopia overflowing with coins, the quina tree and the vicuña—emblems of the nation’s natural riches (fig. 1). In 1834, Chile adorned its seal with the huemul (Andean deer), “the most rare and singular quadruped of our sierras,” and the condor, “the strongest, most spirited and corpulent bird that inhabits our skies.”14José Joaquín Prieto and Joaquín Tocornal, “Discurso ante el congreso,” in Amunátegui Aldunate and Miguel Luis, Los precursores de la independencia de Chile, vol. 3 (Santiago: Imprenta, Litografía i Encuadernación Barcelona, 1870), 590. The changing national seals of Bolivia included the silver mountain of Potosí, the alpaca, a sheaf of wheat and the árbol del pan (breadfruit tree), expressing the nation’s abundance in the mineral, animal and vegetable realms. And as Gran Colombia, founded by Simón Bolívar, broke apart, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama and Venezuela devised their own emblems, most of which also centered on nature and its economic potential.

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Description: Peruvian Coat of Arms (Escudo de las armas peruanas) by Cortés, José...

FIG. 1 José Leandro Cortés (dates unknown), frame by José Antadilla, Escudo de las armas peruanas (Peruvian Coat of Arms), 1832. Painted oil on mahogany, dimensions unknown. Casa de Moneda de Lima, Museo Numismático del Banco Central de Reserva, Lima.

Rather than emphasizing historical or political images, the new nations of South America thus largely chose to define themselves through references to their natural resources.15While some of the first national emblems in the region alluded to the Indigenous past, most of these did not endure. Such references—many of which emerged in the Río de la Plata, and from there reached Chile and Peru—abounded mainly in countries where ethnicity was not a central political issue. In most places, they were replaced early on by emblems relating to natural resources. For the Great Colombia, see Georges Lomné, “El ‘espejo roto’ de la Colombia bolivariana (1820–1850),” in Inventando la Nación: Iberoamérica, Siglo XIX, ed. Antonio Annino and François-Xavier Guerra (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003), 475–500. On the passage from cultural to natural emblems in Peru, see Natalia Majluf, “Los fabricantes de emblemas: Los símbolos nacionales en la transición republicana. Perú, 1820–1825,” in Visión y símbolos: Del virreinato criollo a la república peruana, ed. Ramón Mujica (Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 2006), 203–241. This preference was determined by the generalized discourse on the relative strength of American nature that had divided thinkers on either side of the Atlantic since the mid-eighteenth century. Creole scientists, struck by pride, defended local climes, arguing against European attacks on the flora and fauna of the Americas.16Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, Digital Research Library, 2009), 12–22. The increasing emphasis on geography and resources can, in effect, be considered a vindication of Creole patriotism, but it also offered ethnically neutral ground on which to forge a local identity, helping to elude possible political tensions in culturally diverse nations.17Majluf, “Los fabricantes de emblemas.”

Judging from these official emblems, nature would appear to figure prominently in the South American imagination. Yet, from a broader perspective, this proposition must be qualified and its implications analyzed. It is significant that landscape as a standard pictorial genre was largely absent from South American visual culture. In most Andean countries, the genre emerged only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as part of the broader insertion of South American artists into cosmopolitan European circles. Until that time, the vast majority of local views were produced by prominent foreign traveling artists such as Johann Moritz Rugendas and Frederic Edwin Church, and by the many amateurs and minor painters who flooded the region after independence.18See, among others, Katherine Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); and Pablo Diener, Rugendas, 1802–1858 (Augsburg: Wissner, 1997). There is indeed no regional equivalent to the seemingly endless succession of landscape scenes that marked the development of European and North American painting in this period.

This is not to say that physical places in the Andean region were not represented by various means; rather, they were not a subject for artistic practice. Many of the premises on which landscape painting was founded were simply not operative in the region: the notion of a view, which presupposes a spectator and a leisure class; the modern idea of aesthetic contemplation of nature; and even the very concept of the countryside, which consolidated in opposition to the city at the turn of the nineteenth century in a number of European centers. Even in South American literature, landscape was rarely a site for aesthetic exploration of either the sublime or the picturesque. As Marie Louise Pratt has observed, Bolivar’s classic text inspired by his ascent of Chimborazo, Ecuador’s highest peak, turns the conquest of nature into an allegory of the liberator’s exploits; this contrasts with the “aestheticized scientism” of Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, by whom it was directly inspired.19Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 181. Andrés Bellos foundational 1823 poem “La agricultura de la zona tórrida” (“Agriculture of the Torrid Zone”) similarly evades the aesthetics of nature in favor of a pastoral ideal centered on the riches of the land.20Ibid., 173. Pratt, however, sets Bello’s poem against the commercial impulses of the “capitalist vanguard.” In large measure, this tendency derived from Hispanic artistic ideals and pictorial traditions, in which landscape played a relatively minor role.21There is a vast literature on the absence of landscape in the Spanish tradition, from Julio Caro Baroja to Francisco Calvo Serraller. Nonetheless, Luisa Elena Alcalá has argued in favor of a differentiated tradition, founded on the religious and political functions of landscape. Luisa Elena Alcalá, “‘A Call to Action’: Visual Persuasion in a Spanish American Painting,” Art Bulletin 94, no. 4 (December 2012): 594–617.

Yet there was another Hispanic legacy that influenced the way in which the region’s natural surroundings would be interpreted and visualized: the official expeditions of the late eighteenth century, which fostered the scientific exploration of Spanish colonies and produced an immense and unprecedented corpus of images of local nature, comprising mainly herbaria and scientific illustrations, which constructed a vision of natural bounty through isolated sequential images (figs. 2 and 3).22See, among many others, Antonio González Bueno, La expedición botánica al Virreinato del Perú (1777–1788) (Madrid: Lunwerg, 1988); and María Pilar de San Pío Aladren, Mutis y la Real Expedición Botánica del Nuevo Reyno de Granada, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Lunwerg, 1992). For a summary in English of the vast literature produced in America and Spain on the scientific expeditions to Hispanic America, see Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire. Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Such genres privileged the focused gaze of the scientist in the transcription of nature, eluding the representation of nature as landscape. A paradigmatic example of this is botanical painter Salvador Rizo Blanco’s homage to the Spanish naturalist José Celestino Mutis; a foundational national image, it virtually translates the landscape in the far distance into the botanical prints and illustrations that dominate the foreground (fig. 4). This approach to nature would endure in the nations that emerged after the wars of independence, establishing the framework for the development of a particular geographic discourse and its corresponding visual culture. National emblems demonstrated this impact even in their formal language, fixing the region’s flora and fauna into static forms that recall those of scientific specimens.

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Description: Passifloraceae (Passiflora adenopoda DC) by Cortés Alcocer, Nicolás

FIG. 2 Nicolás Cortés Alcocer (born and died Quito, Ecuador, 1787–1816), Passiflora adenopoda DC (Passifloraceae), 1783–1816. From Real Expedición Botánica del Nuevo Reino de Granada (Royal Botanical Expedition of the New Kingdom of Granada). Tempera on paper, 54 × 38 cm (21.26 × 14.96 in). Archives of the Real Jardín Botánico, CSIC, Madrid. Div. III, 2043.

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Description: Trujillo del Perú by Unknown

FIG. 3 Unknown artist (Peruvian), from Trujillo del Perú (vol. 18), c. 1782–1785. Watercolor on paper, dimensions unknown. Banco BBVA Continental, Lima.

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Description: José Celestino Mutis by Blanco, Salvador Rizo

FIG. 4 Salvador Rizo Blanco (born Mompos, Colombia, 1762; died Bogotá, Colombia, 1816), José Celestino Mutis, 1800. Oil on canvas, 118 × 104 cm (46.46 × 40.94 in). Colección Museo de la Independencia—Casa del Florero, Ministerio de Cultura, Bogotá. 48. Photo © Museo de la Independencia/Señor J. Fotografía.

Costumbrismo drawings and watercolors, largely centered on scenes of urban people, dress and customs, similarly reflect their distant origins in the taxonomic formulas of the Enlightenment. In the nineteenth century, artists such as Ramón Salas and Juan Agustín Guerrero of Ecuador, Francisco “Pancho” Fierro Palas of Peru and Ramón Torres Méndez of Colombia depicted street criers and racial types as individual figures who stand out against the abstract background of a white page; these images rarely, if ever, suggest even the barest traces of a broader context (fig. 5).23Natalia Majluf, Tipos del Perú: La Lima criolla de Pancho Fierro (Madrid: El Viso, the Hispanic Society of America, 2008).

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Description: Woman with Basket on her Head by Fierro, Pancho

FIG. 5 Francisco “Pancho” Fierro Palas (born and died Lima, Peru, c. 1807–1879), Woman with Basket on her Head, late 1830s. Watercolor, 22.5 × 17.1 cm (8.86 × 6.73 in). Transfer from Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, Gift of Bingham Family Papers, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

The ambitious descriptive projects that gave imaginary shape to the new political territories carved out in the process of independence were also affected by the economic motivations underlying late-eighteenth-century scientific expeditions. It could be argued that the totalizing vision of the great albums and atlases published by Claudio Gay in Chile, Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán and Antonio Raimondi in Peru, and Giovanni Battista Agostino Codazzi in Colombia and Venezuela—to name but a few—in fact contributed to the constitution of these nations as recognizable imagined communities (fig. 6). Through the systematic combination of maps and images, these publications brought together the scientist’s and the surveyor’s gazes in order to define a nation’s physical boundaries, the inventory of its resources and a program for progress. Such efforts produced an instrumental approach to the visual configuration of natural surroundings, which marginalized aesthetic contemplation. Nature, in effect, existed not as a value unto itself but as a set of resources that would sustain scientific and economic progress. Thus, in representations of local geography, science preceded art, and the descriptive impulse of the topographical survey dominated over the lyrical imagination.

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Description: Physical and Political Atlas of the Republic of Venezuela (Atlas físico y...

FIG. 6 Giovanni Battista Agostino Codazzi (born Lugo, Italy, 1793; died Espíritu Santo, Colombia, 1859), lithography by Thierry Brothers, Atlas físico y político de la República de Venezuela (Physical and Political Atlas of the Republic of Venezuela), 1840. Lithograph, dimensions unknown.

The primacy of material development explains why cityscapes were more common than natural scenes in paintings, prints and photographs. It also accounts for the fact that, when views of nature do appear, they are rarely the main subjects of images: these vast territorial expanses, regularly punctuated by elements of modern technology, serve merely as backdrops for broader narratives of progress. The earliest photographs of the Andes, for instance, were commissioned to promote the great railroad projects of the period, or by miners and landowners intent on documenting their commercial exploits (figs. 7 and 8).24Natalia Majluf, “Traces of an Absent Landscape: Photographers in Andean Visual Culture,” History of Photography 24, no. 2 (summer 2000): 91–100. Such images leave no space for transcendent meditations on nature; they are practical records, documents of entrepreneurial advances or illustrations of scientific or political narratives. Most of the isolated landscape drawings and paintings made by Ecuadorian artist and explorer Manuel Ugalde in Bolivia and Peru between the 1850s and 1880s, for example, were produced during his wanderings as an entrepreneur and traveler and spurred by a vision of progress that would nonetheless permanently elude his grasp.25Natalia Majluf, “De la pintura y de otras técnicas del progreso. Manuel Ugalde, pintor y explorador del sur andino,” in Homenaje, ed. Félix Denegri Luna (Lima: Fondo Editorial, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2000), 393–416. Until the second half of the century, there is virtually no view of nature in the Andean region that is not instrumentally related to a specific intervention on the land.

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Description: Central Railway, Rio Blanco (Ferrocarril central, Rio Blanco) by Courret, Eugenio

FIG. 7 Eugène “Eugenio” Courret (born Angouleme, France, 1841; died France, 1900), Ferrocarril central, Rio Blanco (Central Railway, Rio Blanco), c. 1875. Albumen print, 20.5 × 26.5 cm (8.1 × 10.4 in). Museo de Arte de Lima. 1996.5.44.

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Description: Southern Railway, Sumbay Bridge (Ferrocarril del Sur, Puente de Sumbay) by Villalba,...

FIG. 8 Ricardo Villalba (active 1860–1880, location unknown), Ferrocarril del Sur, Puente de Sumbay (Southern Railway, Sumbay Bridge), c. 1874. Albumen print, 20 × 24.7 cm (7.87 × 9.72 in). Museo de Arte de Lima.

Even as landscape imagery began to appear in the last third of the nineteenth century, it was largely tied to entrepreneurial or scientific approaches. It is significant that some of the earliest views by Ecuadorian artists were commissioned by Alphons Stübel, a German geologist who between 1871 and 1873 hired—and trained—the young Rafael Troya to produce a large series of paintings as scientific records (p. 42).26Alexandra Kennedy-Troya, ed., Escenarios para una patria: Paisajismo ecuatoriano, 1850–1950 (Quito: Museo de la Ciudad, 2008). Looked at in isolation, such views could be mistaken for statements on the aesthetic qualities of nature, but as part of Stübel’s systematic and totalizing endeavor, they were intended to function as “physiognomic-geological” representations that would enable scientific study of the volcanic mountain ranges.27See Stübel’s fascinating discussion of the advantages of painting with respect to the “monotonous grey of mediocre photographs” and the limitations of other visual records in his preface to Alphons Stübel, Las montañas del Ecuador retratadas y descritas geológica-topográficamente, trans. Federico Yépez (Quito: Banco Central de Ecuador/UNESCO, 2004), 43. For most of the nineteenth century, landscape was not, strictly speaking, an aesthetic nor a properly pictorial category.

The manner of conceiving images of nature would change dramatically as pictorial landscapes began to make their presence felt in South America, largely in the wake of the new academies formed early on in Brazil and Chile, and through the gradual incorporation of new generations of artists into cosmopolitan artistic circles. Landscape painting began to establish and extend its presence as an artistic category toward the end of the nineteenth century and, in the process, the genre gradually distinguished itself from other forms of representation, becoming ever more removed from utilitarian maps, illustrated cityscapes and documentary photographs. As landscape painting came to be inscribed in the discourses of autonomous art, images of natural scenery acquired different meanings that were more centrally pertinent to the developing notion of a national aesthetic. This change is perhaps most clearly visible in the evolution of plein air painting at the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as photography, which gave the representation of local geographies new life under the spell of international pictorialism.

Yet the aestheticization of landscape would remain a marginal tradition even in the early twentieth century, a period dominated by a cultural emphasis on definitions of nationhood. Luis A. Martínez’s magisterial painting Paisaje (con chozas, sembríos, y montañas) (Landscape [with huts, farming and mountains]) (see below) exemplifies this tendency. In the organicist imaginings of the period’s intellectuals, land came to be perceived as the very foundation of a nation, as the true, autochthonous source of the telluric forces shaping both race and culture.28Martin S. Stabb, In Quest of Identity: Patterns in the Spanish American Essay of Ideas, 1890–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967). Painters would thus turn to the landscape mainly as a setting for scenes of Indigenous or Mestizo life and customs, again using it as a backdrop for narratives that had little relation to discourses focused on nature’s aesthetic value (fig. 9). It is significant that the genre gained prominence among artists who promoted the formalist exploration of painting as opposed to nationalist or social concerns, as part of the modernist credo of “art for art’s sake.” From this perspective, landscape clearly emerges as an aesthetic fact.

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Description: The Indian Mayor of Chincheros: Varayoc (Varayoc o el alcalde indio de Chincheros)...

FIG. 9 José Sabogal (born Cajabamba, Peru, 1888; died Lima, Peru, 1956), Varayoc o el alcalde indio de Chincheros (The Indian Mayor of Chincheros: Varayoc), 1925. Oil on canvas, 169 × 109 cm (66.54 × 42.91 in). Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino, Lima/Museo de Arte de Lima.

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Description: Landscape [with huts, farming and mountains] (Paisaje [con chozas sembríos y...

Luis A. Martínez (born and died Ambato, Ecuador, 1869–1909), Paisaje (con chozas, sembríos y montañas) (Landscape [with huts, farming and mountains]), c. 1905. Oil on canvas, 53 × 93 cm (20.87 × 36.61 in). Museo Nacional de Quito, Ministerio de Cultura y Patrimonio del Ecuador. Photo by Ramiro Salazar, 2015.

When examined in broader global contexts, the history of landscape painting in the Andean region compels us to reflect on the constructed nature of the genre, a form of representation that became normalized only as the modern conception of the arts broadened its international influence. The general absence of local landscape views in the nineteenth century—itself a product of the enduring strength of colonial traditions and the gradual and selective appropriation of modern aesthetics—helps place landscape in perspective. It also generates a productive estrangement with regard to a genre that has been traditionally believed to be as natural as the scenes it claims to represent.29W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Natalia Majluf

CASE STUDY
Landscapes of Desire: The Land as Resource in the Caribbean

The Greater Caribbean comprises hundreds of islands, from the northernmost Bahamas to the southernmost archipelagos of Trinidad and Tobago and the nations associated with the Netherlands (Curaçao, Aruba and Bonaire) to the southwest. In addition, we must consider the bordering areas of mainland North, Central and South America as part of the Caribbean. Cultural roots and artistic influences vary widely: from the crosscurrents of Indigenous peoples who made back-and-forth journeys from island to mainland long before the arrival of Europeans in 1492, to those of many areas of the African continent, from which, beginning in the early years of the fifteenth century, enslaved peoples were brought across the Atlantic by Spanish conquerors and settlers.30Peter Hulme offers a compelling analysis of these phenomena in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London/New York: Methuen, 1986). Later, many other European nations as well as the United States of America availed themselves of Caribbean lands for their abundant natural resources. Spain, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark all claimed territories in the basin. The Monroe Doctrine, issued in 1823, facilitated U.S. intervention in both South America and the Caribbean and ushered in a period of political and cultural colonization in the region.31Katherine Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989). Manthorne offers additional important insights into Caribbean landscape painting in “Plantation Pictures in the Americas, circa 1880: Land, Power and Resistance,” Nepantla: A View from the South 2 (2001): 317–353.

Commodities were always at the root of colonialist desire. The Bahamian island now known as Watlings was the site of Christopher Columbus’s first landfall. A well-known image that Dutch illustrator and publisher Theodore de Bry created for his 1590–1664 volumes collectively entitled Grands Voyages: America (Great Voyages: America) depicts a fanciful scene: Columbus and his shipmates receive tribute from Indigenous people, who offer them objects made, presumably, of precious metals (fig. 1). In the background, a cross is being planted, attesting to the ostensible purpose of conquest. The true motive was, of course, the desire for the riches of the region—principal among them gold. Indeed, at the end of Columbus’s first of four voyages, he was informed of a great gold horde on an island known as Borinquen (present-day Puerto Rico). He returned in 1493 and began the exploitation of that most precious of substances with the help of members of the enslaved Indigenous populations.

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Description: Christopher Columbus Receiving Gifts from the Cacique Guacanagri, in Hispaniola...

FIG. 1 Theodore de Bry (born Liège, Belgium, 1528; died Frankfurt, Germany, 1598), Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) Receiving Gifts from the Cacique Guacanagri, in Hispaniola (Haiti). From Americae Tertia Paris IV (1594). Engraving, dimensions unknown. Bibliothèque nationale, Paris. Bridgeman Images.

In a consideration of the land and its resources and the concomitant visual images that attest to the significance of these commodities within Caribbean societies, it is important to stretch the meaning of the term “resource.” There are indeed hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of paintings, drawings, prints, maps and other sources of knowledge that speak to the enormity of these products as staples for the subsistence of local and European economies. Yet the notion of resource in the context of a place like the Caribbean should also evoke personal encounters and the metaphorical consumption of the region’s landscapes as an alternative form of exploitation. The Caribbean represented a powerful lure for generations of artists who pursued the desire constructed by the urge to embrace Otherness. Just as the Middle East or the Maghreb served as loci of yearning for generations of “Orientalists” from both sides of the Atlantic during the nineteenth century, the Caribbean exerted an equally strong attraction for artists in search of the “exotic” and the far away. In the case of North American artists, the Caribbean was also much easier to reach than Palestine or North Africa. Thus we find scores of U.S.-based painters (including those of the Hudson River School) traveling to Cuba, Jamaica and beyond in the second half of the nineteenth century. Among artists of a more avant-garde tendency working in this period, Paul Gauguin sought refuge from the incursions of European urban chaos, most famously in the South Pacific. Yet his lengthy sojourn in Tahiti and the Marquesa Islands was preceded by six months in Martinique, between June and November 1887. The approximately eleven landscapes and figure compositions he made there marked a turning point in the development of his taste for the “exotic.”

Canadian artists were by no means immune to the attractions of the Caribbean. Among the many distinguished painters who visited the islands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the Montreal figure and landscape artist James Wilson Morrice (see below). Morrice painted in styles as divergent as Ashcan School realism (he was a friend of Robert Henri), a symbolist-laden form of Impressionism, and a lively expressionist manner not unlike that of his colleague Henri Matisse, with whom he had worked in Tangier. Morrice made his first trip to Cuba in 1915, invited by his friends the Van Homes, great Montreal industrialists and collectors who had an interest in the Havana streetcar industry. Morrice mainly made cityscapes of the Cuban capital before leaving for Jamaica. A 1921 journey to Trinidad produced some of his most outstanding late scenes, such as his Landscape, Trinidad, which depicts Macqueripe’s Bay near Port of Spain.32Landscape, Trinidad, c. 1921, Collection of the National Gallery of Canada. On Morrice, see James Wilson Morrice, 1865–1924 (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1985), as well as the brief biographies Lucie Doráis, J.W. Morrice (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1985); and Wayne Larsen, James Wilson Morrice: Painter of Light and Shadow (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008). In this oil, the natural elements seem to come alive through their definition by a brush heavily loaded with dense, saturated colors.

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Description: Landscape, West Indies by Morrice, James Wilson

James Wilson Morrice (born Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 1865; died Tunis, Tunisia, 1924), Landscape, West Indies, c. 1918–1921. Oil on canvas, 59.7 × 81.3 cm (23.5 × 32 in). Collection Power Corporation of Canada, Montreal. 2000.071.1.

The roots of the visual aesthetic that shaped trends in Caribbean landscape painting (by both foreigners and native-born artists) are found in the eighteenth century. Agostino Brunias was an Italian artist trained in Britain. He arrived in the Caribbean around 1770 and spent approximately thirty years working on the islands of Dominica, St. Vincent and Tobago. Many of Brunias’s paintings and drawings combine landscapes and figures to demonstrate the peaceful nature of the different races that inhabited the islands. Art historian Kay Dian Kriz sees this as part of the artist’s aim to underscore these peaceful islands as “civilized” places where enterprising Europeans could make money.33Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 58. See also Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth Century British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 143; Mia Bagneris, “Reimagining Race, Class and Identity in the New World” in Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, ed. Richard Aste (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2013), especially 179; and Edward J. Sullivan, From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oiler and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2014), chap. 1. Brunias’s Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape (fig. 2) integrates the virtual encyclopedia of métissage (racial blendings) within an idyllic landscape that reminds us more of a garden as described by Jean-Antoine Watteau or an English meadow in the manner of Thomas Gainsborough than of a setting in the tropics.

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Description: Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape by Brunias,...

FIG. 2 Agostino Brunias (born Rome, Italy, 1730; died Roseau, Dominica, 1796), Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape, c. 1770–1780. Oil on canvas, 50.8 × 66.4 cm (20 × 26.14 in). Brooklyn Museum, New York, gift of Mrs. Carll H. de Silver in memory of her husband, by exchange and gift of George S. Hellman, by exchange. 2010.59.

British painter George Robertson came to Jamaica in 1772 in the employ of William Beckford of Somerly, a fabulously wealthy owner of land and slaves whose fortune derived from his several sugar plantations on the island. Robertson’s paintings, which attest to his art historical sources in Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, as well as in the early modern Dutch landscapists, such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Aelbert Cuyp, were in many instances made into prints and widely disseminated in Britain and throughout Europe. Prints, indeed, provided a major source of knowledge—or at least evocation—of faraway places for European and American audiences, and thus it is of critical importance that they be studied as barometers of taste and attitude toward landscape and the peoples who inhabited the places depicted. In many cases, prints helped shape opinions, creating images in the minds of would-be travelers who would never actually see the places in question and giving them a sense (often dubious) of the region’s “essential” characteristics. In Thomas Vivares’s print after Robertson of the Fort William Estate (fig. 3), we observe a sugar plantation that was virtually never visited by its owner, Beckford. Unlike landscapes by Gainsborough, Thomas Reynolds or George Romney, to which this work is related, Robertson shows a place that was cultivated by enslaved people whose backbreaking labor served to enrich the owner with each day of their miserable existence. Nonetheless, we are given few hints of turmoil in such gentle scenes, which, like the works by Brunias, were deliberately created to suggest the Caribbean as a safe, temperate and fertile locale for investment and exploitation.

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Description: A View of the Island of Jamaica, of Fort William Estate by Vivarès, Thomas

FIG. 3 Thomas Vivares (1735–c. 1790, locations unknown), after drawings by George Robertson, A View of the Island of Jamaica, of Fort William Estate, with Part of Roaring River Belonging to Mr. William Beckford, Esq.r, near Savannah la Marr, 1778. Engraving, 47 × 56.7 cm (18.5 × 22.32 in). Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, Paul Mellon Collection. B2001.2.1520.

Such conventions for depicting both untamed and cultivated nature (especially sugar plantations) in the Anglophone Caribbean islands became so ingrained within the traditions of populated landscapes in both paintings and prints that nineteenth-century representations rarely vary from these prototypes. Examining several key figures in the Anglophone Caribbean, we are struck by the fact that one of the guiding forces behind the creation of this specialized iconography is a desire to record day-to-day events in the life of the plantation (almost always suppressing even the slightest hint of pain or the hardships of labor of those most directly involved in the plantation’s workings). On the other hand, in the era following abolition (that is, 1838 in the British colonies), there is a virtual “plantation nostalgia” evident in depictions of the verdant landscapes. Such images codified in the minds of their European beholders (the principal audiences for works like this) the “appropriateness” of the centuries-long colonial presence in the Caribbean. Of course, a larger study of colonialist appropriation of landscape throughout the world would reveal similar politico-visual strategies in operation in virtually all territories occupied by British (and other) European powers, from North America to Africa, Asia, Australia and beyond. There are, however, certain arresting exceptions to this rule.

British artist William Clark set out for Antigua in the early 1820s. By 1823, he had created a series of ten aquatints published in London.34William Clark, Ten Views of the Island of Antigua: In Which Are Represented the Process of Sugar Making and the Employment of the Negroes (London: T. Clay, 1823). Clark makes it clear in prints such as Planting the Sugar Cane (fig. 4) that black slaves work under duress in the blazing sun. The overseer, wearing a black hat and carrying a whip, sees to it that their toil is unrelenting. These prints were widely disseminated and reprinted throughout the first half of the century. The slave population in the British West Indies was immense: in 1823, when Clark created his series, there were 717,000 slaves in the twenty British colonies and the majority of them (some 435,000) were attached to sugar estates.35Richard S. Dunn, “Slave Production and Slave Women in Jamaica,” in Civilization and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville/London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 50–51. While Clark does not present the most virulent scenes of slavery within the lush plantation landscape, his focus on its existence and his suggestion of monotonous, exhausting labor does tend to link these images with the growing body of abolitionist imagery that accompanied the substantial anti-slavery literature in Britain and the U.S.36See Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), chap. 2. Yet explicitly anti-slave iconography was absent in the visual and material culture of Hispanophone islands. The Spanish crown held a tighter rein over visual depictions of activities in its overseas colonies and thus very little in the way of abolitionist art can be found, even if there were indeed in the nineteenth century active abolitionist societies in Madrid and elsewhere throughout Spain, as well as in the Spanish-held islands of the Caribbean.

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Description: Digging Or Rather Hoeing The Cane Holes, Antigua by Clark, William

FIG. 4 William Clark (born Ladysmith, Virginia, United States of America, 1838; died St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America, 1838), Planting the Sugar Cane, 1823. Aquatint, dimensions unknown. The British Library/NW0051 Slavery Images, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

The work of Michel-Jean Cazabon is among the most singular in the history of Caribbean landscape art of the mid-nineteenth century. Cazabon was a free man of color born in Trinidad whose father had immigrated to the then-Spanish island from Martinique, married a wealthy Martinican émigré and had four children. Cazabon grew up in the post-1797 era of British hegemony of the island. He was sent to school in Britain, studied painting and drawing there and in Paris, and returned to his native island to become its premier artist. He specialized in landscapes, city views and, in a few instances, representations of the South Asian immigrants who had begun to arrive in Trinidad in the mid-1840s after abolition ended the practice of slavery.37On Cazabon, see Geoffrey MacLean, An Illustrated Biography of Trinidad’s Nineteenth Century Painter Michel Jean Cazabon (Port of Spain: Aquarela Galleries, 1986); and Amar Wahab, Colonial Inventions: Landscape, Power and Representation in Nineteenth-Century Trinidad (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Wahab provides an in-depth summary of the various theoretical approaches to Caribbean landscape of the nineteenth century, centering his arguments on those artists who depicted Trinidad. Many of Cazabon’s paintings have been lost, but a substantial number still remain in private hands on the island.

Cazabon’s work was widely disseminated in the form of prints. In 1857, the artist published two volumes of prints known as the Album of Trinidad. Of the thirty-six works, based on watercolors by the artist, there is one depiction of a sugar plantation, Garden Estate, Arouca (fig. 5). Judging from the smoke emanating from the factory at the right and the cart in the sugar-cane field at the lower center, substantial work is being undertaken. Cazabon chooses to emphasize the peaceful aspects of the site: even the South Asian workers or black laundresses he depicts appear as types—benign, if anonymous, sitters for a series of picturesque views of a land that seems to be at rest, even though there were considerable tensions between the Asian laborers, Afro-Trinidadian workers and white descendants from the French and Spanish colonial eras. Thus, well into the later nineteenth century, even distinguished artists from the region itself often continued to employ idealizing European conventions when depicting Caribbean landscapes. Perhaps, as Trinidadian scholar Amar Wahab suggests, Cazabon was less a seeker of the social and geographical realities of his country of origin than a promoter of an essentially colonialist, European-centered view of the locale. His images evince little or nothing of class distinctions or the fraught nature of a land fissured by the scourge of slave labor.38Wahab, Colonial Inventions, 113–158.

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Description: Garden Estate, Arouca by Cazabon, Michel Jean

FIG. 5 Michel-Jean Cazabon (born San Fernando, Trinidad, 1813; died St. Pierre, Trinidad, 1888), Garden Estate, Arouca, 1857. From Album of Trinidad (Paris: Geny-Gros). Media and dimensions unknown. Image courtesy of Mark Pereira and 101 Art Gallery.

Cuba is the largest Caribbean island, and since early colonial times the hub of an immense trade in a wide variety of commodities. Havana was its principal port and many views of the city produced in print form throughout the nineteenth century (especially after 1850) attest to the liveliness of its commercial prowess. Edouard (Eduardo) Laplante created a series of city and rural views in the 1850s that offers a comprehensive, quasi-encyclopedic understanding of the topography of the countryside and the profit-making aspects of the city. The lithograph known as La Habana: Vista general tomada desde la entrada del puerto (Havana: General View Taken from the Entrance to the Port) (fig. 6) is impressive for both its considerable size and its details. The print shows sailing ships and steamships arriving and leaving the harbor, bound for ports throughout the Americas and Europe, bringing luxury and quotidian commodities to the city and transporting sugar and other articles of trade to sites abroad.39Throughout the nineteenth century, there were many French artists whose influence was definitive in the Caribbean and beyond. In Cuba, Frederic Mialhe created important scenes of the cities and the countryside between 1838 and 1854. As seen in this essay, Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller’s exchanges with his French contemporaries were definitive for the formation of his mature style. Further afield, the Brazilian nineteenth-century modes of painting and sculpture were influenced by the presence, beginning in 1816, of the French Artistic Mission, a group of painters, sculptors and architects invited by local authorities to “modernize” Brazilian art.

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Description: Havana: General View Taken from the Entrance to the Port (La Habana: Vista general...

FIG. 6 Edouard (Eduardo) Laplante (born and died France, 1818–1860), La Habana: Vista general tomada desde la entrada del puerto (Havana: General View Taken from the Entrance to the Port), c. 1858. Lithograph, 57.79 × 83.82 cm (22.75 × 33 in). Cernuda Arte, Florida, United States of America. 03434.

Spanish émigré painter and printmaker Víctor Patricio Landaluze, who arrived in Havana in about 1850 after training in painting and lithography in Madrid and Paris, is the creator of a celebrated mid-century scene.40See Victor Patricio Landaluze (1830–1889) (Bilbao: Museo de Bellas Artes, 1998); and Ε. Carmen Ramos, “Victor Patricio Landaluze and Nineteenth Century Cuban Politics,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2011. Although Landaluze was determined to establish his career in Mexico City, he remained in Cuba until his death in 1889, becoming well known for both his political cartoons and his prints and small-format paintings of local customs; many of these may now be read as racist comments on the vagaries of life in Havana, and especially on the habits of the black population of the island. Landaluze was virulently anti-separationist and militated against the independence movements that were gaining currency in his later lifetime. Therefore, when making paintings on the theme of sugar, such as his famous 1874 Corte de Cana (Cane Harvest),411874, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, Cuba. the artist had a vested interest in minimizing the painful nature of work on the plantation. In this work, another idyllic representation of the sugar industry, the white overseer on horseback directs the cutting and transportation of the cane on a cart drawn by two oxen. Although the cane cutters are obviously engaged in difficult labor, Landaluze does not dwell on the hardships of the process that led to thousands of field workers losing their lives to heatstroke and many processors being mangled by the machinery that pressed the raw cane into juice. Landaluze fashioned a retrogressive, idealistic view of the hacienda (plantation). By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the process of sugar extraction had become more industrialized, with rail lines laid down on estates to transport the cane to processing centers. Here, Landaluze creates a work for the wealthy landowners themselves to contemplate—a painting, perhaps, to assuage their consciences and metaphorically absolve them of any latent guilt in their pursuit of capital through the exploitation of the slave labor force.42By contrast, the illustrations by Mialhe for the 1857 book Los ingenios (with a text by plantation owner Justo G. Cantero documenting the modernization of the sugar industry) were markedly more precise and objective renditions of the new forms of machinery and practices in the processing of this commodity. See the modern edition (Madrid: Centra de Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas, 2005).

Francisco Oller y Cestero of Puerto Rico plays a unique role within the history of landscape painting in the Caribbean.43See Osiris Delgado Mercado, Francisco Oller (1833–1917): Pintor de Puerto Rico (San Juan: Centro de Estudios Superiores de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, 1983) and Francisco Oller: A Realist-Impressionist (Museo de Arte de Ponce, 1983); and Sullivan, From San Juan to Paris and Back. Born in Bayamón in 1833, Oller emerged from a small art world to become a painter of international stature. Stimulated by the art of José Campeche, who practiced a rococo and neoclassical mode of art brought to the island by Spanish émigré painter Luis Paret y Alcázar, Oller spent some twenty years in Europe, on four separate trips. Initial studies at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando) in Madrid were followed by long sojourns in Paris, where he associated with, among others, Thomas Couture, Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro and other members of the Impressionist circle. Oller was intensely interested in pedagogy and founded multiple art academies in San Juan and surrounding towns. His dedication to his native island was manifested by his returns there from the more cosmopolitan art world of Paris.

Oller became well known for his portraits, still lifes and occasional history paintings. Yet it is in his landscapes that we find the true expression of his interest in light, and in the flora so characteristic of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean in general. Although Oller often depicted the countryside around Paris, his tropical landscapes are his most memorable. Linda Nochlin has suggested that images such as Landscape with Royal Palm44C. 1897, Ateneo Puertorriqueño, San Juan.—an imposing image of majestic trees in a setting without reference to people—are emblematic of Puerto Rican national self-identification. Oller was not a wealthy artist, but he was a very generous one. He worked around the island, painting images of the many plantations on which he lived and often paying for his stays with art. His pictures of the haciendas across the island are understood not only as light-filled depictions of the mountainous central portions or beachside coastal areas of Puerto Rico, but also as representations of its commodities: principally sugar, but also plantains and coffee.

In 1885, Oller was commissioned by the Barcelona-born sugar magnate José Gallart Forgas, who owned four plantations in the southern part of Puerto Rico, to paint “portraits” of these four ingenios (sugar mills). Oller made two of them. His Hacienda La Fortuna (fig. 7) depicts work on the estate on a morning in early January: the mist on the ground attests to the time of year. In this work, there is no reliance on the picturesque conventions seen in earlier paintings. Oller emphasizes the Caribbean sky by giving it substantial space in the composition. The foreground plays a principal role as a stage on which the activities of the relatively few human participants are carried out. The muted yellows and greens of the ground and the trapiche (mill) are repeated throughout the composition. Work goes on, as we can tell from the smoke emanating from the smokestack. The great house of the overseer or the owners is at the back center, and slave quarters are found at the far left. Some of the cane is being moved by ox cart, yet the narrow tracks of a rail line are visible at the left. The land itself is the protagonist in this painting, which is as much about the impression of light and air as it is about the specific locale Oller depicts. This painting was made on site, and in it Oller expresses a deep sense of integration within the landscape. Hacienda La Fortuna stands as an icon of the sugar trade—the backbone of commerce on the island—while at the same time serving as a representation of the artist’s ineffable and personal identification with his native Puerto Rico.

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Description: Hacienda La Fortuna by Oller y Cestero, Francisco

FIG. 7 Francisco Oller (born Bayamón, Puerto Rico, 1833; died San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1917), Hacienda La Fortuna, 1885. Oil on canvas, 66 × 101.6 cm (26 × 40 in). Brooklyn Museum, New York, gift of Lilla Brown in memory of her husband, John W. Brown, by exchange. 2012.19.

Oller’s student Pío Casimiro Bacener depicted the plantations not painted by Oller to fulfill the commission from Gallart, including Hacienda La Serrano (see below). Bacener, who was born in San Juan, was an Afro–Puerto Rican artist, the son of an enslaved mother. He had studied in Oller’s Escuela de Dibujo y Pintura (School of Drawing and Painting). His only known works are three plantation pictures and a self-portrait. Bacener’s Hacienda La Reparada (fig. 8) is an attractive painting that follows the format of Oller’s Hacienda La Fortuna and approximates its large size. It displays a broad expanse of sky and landscape, showing the ingenios buildings grouped around a large area of land. Bacener was less polished an artist than his teacher, but his interest in the details of the scene evokes his desire to give the viewer an almost-encyclopedic visual description of life on the premises; this adds a note of documentary interest that is not always present in Oller’s works.

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Description: Hacienda La Reparada by Bacener, Pío Casimiro

FIG. 8 Pío Casimiro Bacener (born and died San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1840–1900), Hacienda La Reparada, c. 1885–1890. Oil on canvas, 59.1 × 101.5 cm (23.25 × 39.94 in). Collection of Carmen G. Correa, Ponce, Puerto Rico. Photo by Johnny Betancourt.

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Description: Hacienda La Serrano by Bacener, Pío Casimiro

Pío Casimiro Bacener, Hacienda La Serrano, 1880. Oil on canvas, 55.88 × 124.46 cm (22 × 49 in). Private collection, Miami Beach, Florida, United States of America.

We may also understand some of Oller’s landscapes as having specifically political inflections. During the Spanish-American War in the summer of 1898, the U.S. invaded Puerto Rico at the beach near Guánica, not far from the southern city of Ponce. The invasion, on July 26, marked a turning point in the war, which resulted in Spain’s loss of its last overseas territories: Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines and Guam. Oller had been named official court painter to the kings of Spain, and as such he perhaps found himself in a precarious position within the new social and political order. He and his family found refuge in the Hacienda Aurora on the north of the island during the early phases of what would become a continuing annexation and colonization of Puerto Rico by the United States. Oller’s depiction of the estate (fig. 9) is a small but powerful painting, evoking the post-emancipation era when enslaved labor no longer worked the land. In the picture, we see the central (headquarters) as an almost-ruined fragment of what it once was. There is also an unmistakable air of melancholy in this work—not nostalgia for the old order, but perhaps a certain uneasiness about what is to come with new political and social circumstances on the island.

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Description: Hacienda Aurora by Oller y Cestero, Francisco

FIG. 9 Francisco Oller, Hacienda Aurora, 1898–1899. Oil on wood panel, 32 × 55.6 cm (12.6 × 22 in). Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, the Luis A. Ferré Foundation, Inc., bequest of Dolores Forteza, widow of Saldaña, in memory of Víctor Saldaña. 83.1252.

Ramón Frade was one of the few heirs to the pictorial mode established by Oller.45Osiris Delgado Mercado, Ramón Frade León. Pintor Puertorriqueño (1875–1954) (San Juan: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, 1989). His most famous work is his 1905 El pan nuestro (Our Daily Bread).461905, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan. It shows a jíbaro (mountain peasant of mixed race), a rather gnarled man who is shoeless and dressed in field worker’s garments: a white shirt and brown pants. He emerges from a hilly, palm-dotted landscape indicating a place in the central mountain range of Puerto Rico. With a long knife that hangs from the left side of his belt, he has cut a large stalk of plantains (the staple commodity of the local diet) that he proffers to the viewer.

While Our Daily Bread could be understood on one hand as a sentimental image in which a grandfatherly man offers us hospitality, there are other levels on which this work should be judged. First, it is a premonitory image that looks ahead to the increasing power of the North American fruit-processing companies (such as United Fruit) that created the proverbial “banana republics” throughout much of the Caribbean and Central America. The importance of sugar gradually lessened, and from 1900 until the 1950s, the economy of the island was in a state of virtual collapse. Little attention was paid to the island by its new colonial power. Child-mortality rates were alarmingly high and certain sectors of the cities, especially San Juan, became undesirable centers of both crime and disease, as evidenced by some of the striking photographs taken by photographers Edwin Rosskam and Jack Delano, who worked for the Works Progress Administration and Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and early 1940s.47The WPA and the FSA were both U.S.-government projects that addressed the effects of the Great Depression of 1929. They were in existence for a number of years after the worst effects of the economic downturn were eliminated. Artists associated with these initiatives were painters, draftsmen, muralists and photographers. The FSA was especially concerned with addressing poverty in the rural areas of the U.S. and its territories, including Puerto Rico, as well as documenting the debilitating effects of economic hardship. With the rise of the tourism industry, the intervention of various branches of the U.S. government and the involvement of Puerto Rican technicians and artists, social and cultural programs were put into practice in the later 1940s, serving as modernizing forces for the country. Frade’s painting merges landscape and message, creating a potent metaphor of deeply rooted nostalgia with a hint of the inevitability of change.

Edward J. Sullivan

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Félix Émile Taunay, View of a Native Forest Being Reduced to Coal, c. 1840

The French artist Félix Émile Taunay, who directed the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes (Imperial Academy of Fine Arts) in Rio de Janeiro from 1834 to 1851, presented Vista de um mato virgem que se está reduzindo a carvão (View of a Native Forest Being Reduced to Coal) (fig. 1) at the academy’s General Exhibition in 1842. In the exhibition catalogue, the artist alludes to the painting, writing, “According to irrefutable calculations, the vanishing of the finest specimens of the plant kingdom from the outskirts of the City [of Rio de Janeiro] threatens the latter with diminished flow of water and higher average levels of heat, two reciprocally active evils.”48Notícia do Palácio da Academia (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Nacional, 1842), 50–51. In this way, Taunay not only expresses his awareness and concern about environmental destruction but also points to a new approach to landscape painting in Brazil: depicting the country’s natural setting being transformed by human action.49Ibid.

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Description: View of a Native Forest Being Reduced to Coal (Vista de um mato virgem que se...

FIG. 1 Félix Émile Taunay (born Montmorency, France, 1795; died Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1881), Vista de um mato virgem que se está reduzindo a carvão (View of a Native Forest Being Reduced to Coal), c. 1840. Oil on canvas, 134 × 195 cm (52.8 × 76.8 in). Museu Nacional de Belas Artes/IBRAM/MinC, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo by Cláudio de Carvalho Xavier, 2005.

Divided into two parts, View of a Native Forest portrays the stages involved in firing wood to make charcoal in Rio de Janeiro’s Floresta da Tijuca (Tijuca Forest). On the right, the grandiose and unspoiled landscape is about to suffer the impact we see to the left, where forest vegetation has been slashed, fired and reduced to charcoal. Small groups of men examine trees that are to be cut, lined up and carried off in pieces. The pristine forest is represented by its many species of plants, painted in various shades of green, whose presence is imposing in contrast with the smallness of the men entering into the forest.50Alfredo Galvão, “Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre, sua influencia na Academia Imperial e no meio artístico nacional,” Revista do Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional 14 (1959): 52. This Romantic view assumes different nuances on the left of the painting, where charcoal fumes rise from a cemetery of logs, taking on the spectral shape of a large tree.51See Luciano Migliaccio, Século XIX: Catálogo Mostra do redescobrimento Brasil + 500 (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal, 2000).

The scale and subject of the composition carry a very specific message, revealing the painter’s intentions. Taunay shows us the environment from a contemporary, naturalistic and critical stance—a far cry from the Arcadian splendor and pastoral subjects he had been taught to paint by his father, Nicolas-Antoine Taunay. Until this time, Félix Émile’s art production had featured the idealized light and the plane composition typical of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century landscape paintings made after Claude Lorrain and Joseph Vernet. And although View of a Native Forest shows a renewed pictorial discourse, Taunay’s detailed depiction of vegetation, figures and clouds remains unchanged. His father had influenced his approach to these elements; the two had worked on a panorama of Rio de Janeiro in 1824 (pp. 30–31),52Elaine Dias, Paisagem e Academia: Félix Émile Taunay e o Brasil. 1824–1851 (Campinas: Ed. da Unicamp, 2009). the same year Félix Émile was made a professor of landscape painting at the academy.

In addition to critiquing the economic aspects of coal making, View of a Native Forest reveals Taunay’s interest in science by following the example set by Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. The painting invokes the work of botanists and artists who documented landscapes in the Americas.53These include German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, Bavarian botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and German naturalist Rudolf Philippi, who moved to Chile in 1851 and studied issues such as clear-cutting on the sites of plantations. I am grateful to art historian Catalina Valdés for this information. Silva Caesa, Cum Ficu Grandaeva, ad. S. Joannen Marcum, Prov. Rio de Janeiro (Cut Forest with an Old Fig Tree in São João Marcos, Province of Rio de Janeiro) (fig. 2), which illustrates the book Flora Brasiliensis and was possibly known to Taunay, depicts vegetation being burned on the outskirts of Rio. It shows the impact of this technique while contrasting the fig tree with the felled trunks and smoke in the background—a scene accentuated by the description of the extinction of forest species and warnings about the risk of damaging soil and altering the climate.54Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, A viagem de von Martius: Flora Brasiliensis, vol. 1 (Rio de Janeiro: Index, 1996), 75.

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Description: Cut Forest with an Old Fig Tree in São João Marcos, Province of Rio de...

FIG. 2 Attributed to Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (born Erlangen, Bavaria, 1794: died Munich, Bavaria, 1868), Silva Caesa, Cum Ficu Grandaeva, ad. S. Joannen Marcum, Prov. Rio de Janeiro (Cut Forest with an Old Fig Tree in São João Marcos, Province of Rio de Janeiro), c. 1840. From Flora Brasiliensis. Lithograph in two colors (black and sepia) on paper, 29.7 × 45.2 cm (11.7 × 17.8 in). Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius/Coleção Martha e Erico Stickel/Acervo Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro. G.253.

These threats give Taunay’s painting an “ecological” air avant la lettre. This dimension was noted in two articles published in the magazine O Auxiliador (The Helper).55One 1833 article by Cunha Barboza was titled “Speech on Abusive Tree Felling in Upper Valleys and Burning Off Vegetation” and another in 1836 by Conde de Gestas was titled “Memorandum on Abusive Tree Felling and Cutting.” The magazine was published by the Sociedade Auxiliadora da Indústria Nacional, of which Félix Émile Taunay was a member. See José Luiz Werneck da Silva, Isto é o que me parece: A Sociedade Auxiliadora da Indústria Nacional (1827–1904) na formação social brasileira (Niterói: UFF, 1979), 88. Taunay and his brother Charles joined the debate. In his 1837 Manual do Agricultor (Farmer’s Handbook),56Carlos [Charles] Taunay, Manual do Agricultor Brasileiro (repr., São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 2001). See José Augusto Pádua, Um Sopro de Destruição (Rio de Janeiro: JZE, 2004); and Cláudia Valladão de Mattos, “Paisagem, monumento e crítica ambiental na obra de Félix-Émile Taunay,” in Oitocentos: Arte Brasileira do Império à Primeira República, ed. Ana Maria Cavalcanti, Camila Dazzi and Arthur Valle (Rio de Janeiro: EBA/UFRJ/DezenoveVinte, 2008). Charles Taunay noted that part of the Tijuca Forest had been clear-cut to make room for coffee plantations. In 1845, Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre, director of the Imperial Academy from 1854 to 1857, wrote a poem on the destruction of forests, joining the ranks of those who used their ideas or paintbrushes to take up the problematic issue of environmental degradation.

With View of a Native Forest, Taunay won over the critic of the Jornal do Commercio (Journal of Commerce), who wrote that, in the painting, “The scene of destruction is shown in such a lively way that one’s mind is struck and touched by the fate of those majestic leafy trees . . . which will be prey to the deadly axe . . . bringing such disastrous devastation to the attention of the local government and chamber . . . at least in the outskirts of the city, where hygiene is in question.”57Jornal do Commercio, December 18, 1842. By mixing scientific illustration and contemporary history, View of a Native Forest actualized the representation of Brazil’s natural environment, renewed the practice of landscape painting and played a leading role in artistic, historical and naturalistic discussions about Brazil’s forests.

Elaine Dias

Alessandro Ciccarelli, View of Santiago from Peñalolén, 1853

The genre of landscape painting typically denotes a visual representation of the environment: a natural, urban or imaginary one. This category includes thematic and technical distinctions, but there are also stylistic distinctions that fade over the years until they break down, bringing together works of art that were previously considered opposites. This is the case with Alessandro Ciccarelli’s Vista de Santiago desde Peñalolén (View of Santiago from Peñalolén) and Antonio Smith’s El río Cachapoal (The Cachapoal River); each is representative of an opposing nineteenth-century Chilean landscape tradition.

View of Santiago from Peñalolén (fig. 1), painted in 1853, is probably one of the best-known works of nineteenth-century Chilean art. Its creator, Ciccarelli, a native of Naples, was the first director of Chile’s Academia de pintura (Academy of Painting), which was founded in 1849. In the work, a landscape of the city of Santiago is depicted from Peñalolén, an area of the capital located on a mountainside of the Andes. Even today from that position, the whole city is visible, located in a vast valley dotted with hills and surrounded by mountains, with the Andes to the east and the Cordillera de la Costa (Coast Range) to the west.

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Description: View of Santiago from Peñalolén (Vista de Santiago desde...

FIG. 1 Alessandro Ciccarelli (born Naples, Italy, 1808; died Santiago, Chile, 1879), Vista de Santiago desde Peñalolén (View of Santiago from Peñalolén), 1853. Oil on canvas, 85 × 125 cm (33.5 × 49.2 in). Pinacoteca Banco Santander, Santiago, Chile.

The horizon in View of Santiago from Peñalolén is open and very wide, as the line that divides the sky and the mountains is located slightly above the middle of the canvas. The sun is setting in the Coast Range and its yellow, orange and pale-pink light is reflected on the farmlands in the valley, where the city is almost indiscernible. The fleeting light of dusk, rendered with an extremely thin and smooth layer of paint, makes the shapes in the distance diaphanous and homogenous. In contrast, the foreground—where plant species, a human and an animal figure have been more precisely depicted with thicker paint—stands out. In the center of the painting, Ciccarelli himself is seated on a stool in front of an easel with his back toward the viewer. To his side, his horse serenely chews the grass. The painter is dressed in a tailcoat and top hat, with dress shoes that shine as if they have just been polished. His posture, which shows distinction and elegance, differs in every sense from the image of the plein air artist.

Although it is a recognizable view, the shapes of the hills and the Coast Range appear quite diffused and make it impossible to pinpoint the typical landmarks of Santiago’s topography. The plant species do not seem to possess the botanical characteristics of the area either. These details, in addition to the painter’s pose, separate Ciccarelli from the Romantic landscape tradition cultivated by traveling artists like Johann Moritz Rugendas and Ernest Charton, who composed their canvases based on the principles proposed by the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. These differences in style gave rise to a public dispute shortly before Ciccarelli painted this work: Charton, a French painter who lived in Santiago at the time, challenged the Italian to a “duel of brushes” in which each artist would have to paint an urban landscape en plein air. Ciccarelli declined; perhaps View of Santiago—clearly a landscape made in his studio—was his response.58Josefina de la Maza, “Duelo de pinceles: Ernesto Charton y Alejandro Ciccarelli. Pintura y enseñanza en el siglo XIX chileno,” in Vínculos artísticos entre Italia y América. Silencio historiográfico, ed. Fernando Guzmán and Juan Manuel Martínez (Santiago: Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez/Museo Histórico Nacional/CREA, 2012), 218–220.

Unlike many European traveling artists, Ciccarelli did not depict landscapes regularly; in his role as academic director, he favored the genre of history painting. Another exception to this, however, is a view the artist had painted some years earlier in Rio de Janeiro (fig. 2), where he arrived from Europe as the court painter of Empress Teresa Cristina of Brazil. The views of Santiago and Rio de Janeiro are similar in their perspective: both are scenes with figures in the foreground and backgrounds colored by dusky light. They recall the tradition of vedute that was popular in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century and common among the Naples painters with whom Ciccarelli probably spent time during his years of schooling. Both View of Santiago and Rio de Janeiro invite linear readings: they are inscribed with compositional codes that make them into postcards of these cities. In the Chilean case, however, it is evident that Ciccarelli does not intend his rendering of Santiago to be a topographic or botanical description of the place.

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Description: Rio de Janeiro by Cicarelli, Alejandro

FIG. 2 Alessandro Ciccarelli, Rio de Janeiro, 1844. Oil on canvas, 82.3 × 117.5 cm (32.4 × 46.26 in). Collection of Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil, Coleção, Brasiliana/Fundação Estudar, donated by Fundação Estudar, 2007. Photo by Isabella Matheus.

Moreover, one can say that View of Santiago is more a self-portrait than a landscape: instead of attentively reflecting the outside world, the painter puts himself in the landscape, with an interesting strategy of mise en abyme. He stands out as a European painter in a context in which nature is the only reference—a place that must be “put in order” through academic stylization. The distance Ciccarelli puts between himself and nature, so clearly expressed by his gentlemanly attire, is interceded by the tradition of a classical norm that overlaps with reality. Thus the landscape becomes a resource of aesthetic authority for Ciccarelli, whose leadership at the academy was being contested at that time.

Ciccarelli’s most antiestablishment student at the Academy of Painting was Antonio Smith. The son of a Scottish merchant and a Chilean from a well-known family, Smith aspired from early on to become a landscape painter. When he saw that Ciccarelli’s academy favored the study of drawing and intended to turn painting into an illustration of history, he abandoned his academic artistic training. On a trip to Europe, Smith stayed in Florence, where he approached the brothers Carlo and Andrea Markó. The Markós introduced Smith to the modern practice of landscape painting, which implied aesthetic comprehension and a direct experience of nature—something that was completely absent from the academic regimen instilled by Ciccarelli. In 1866, Smith returned to Chile loaded with paintings and set up an atelier that became the breeding ground for an interesting group of Chilean landscape painters who attained leading roles in the artistic scene of the late nineteenth century.59From this group of young painters, Onofre Jarpa stands out; his work is discussed on pages 44–45 of this volume.

Smith’s painting The Cachapoal River (fig. 3) shows a torrent that flows from the high peaks of the Andes to the city of Rancagua, forming deep canyons. Employing a low viewpoint and painting the water with almost photographic realism, Smith offers a landscape that leaps toward the viewer. Of all of Smith’s works—mostly compositions of forests and distant landscapes—this is the one that best expresses nature’s dynamism. It is radically different from Ciccarelli’s scenographic compositions, whose approach Smith opposed, although it also does not respond to the principles of naturalist landscape painting. In The Cachapoal River, the landscape becomes a motif employed as a declaration of autonomy from academic standards and a bold statement of the artist’s affection for nature.

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Description: The Cachapoal River (El río Cachapoal) by Smith, Antonio

FIG. 3 Antonio Smith (born and died Santiago, Chile, 1832–1877), El río Cachapoal (The Cachapoal River), 1870. Oil on canvas, 100 × 146 cm (39.4 × 57.5 in). Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile. PCH-601.

Catalina Valdés

Nicolau Facchinetti, São Tomé das Letras, 1876

In 1875, Nicolau Facchinetti set out on his longest expedition to the hinterlands of Brazil, trekking across the slopes of the Serra da Mantiqueira (Mantiqueira Mountains) to reach the Upper Rio Grande plateau in the south of the state of Minas Gerais. As Facchinetti had never seen this particular type of landscape or topography before, his gaze was captivated outright. This journey led to one of his most outstanding paintings: São Tomé das Letras (fig. 1).

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Description: São Tomé das Letras by Facchinetti, Nicolau Antônio

FIG. 1 Nicolau Facchinetti (born Treviso, Italy, 1824; died Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1900), São Tomé das Letras, 1876. Oil on canvas, 52.2 × 92 cm (20.55 × 36.22 in). Museu Nacional de Belas Artes/IBRAM/MinC, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Facchinetti, who was of Italian origin, had traveled to Rio de Janeiro in 1849. By the time he set out for the high grasslands of Minas Gerais, he had already established a defined language with which to depict the Brazilian landscape. This earned him a prominent position among the country’s landscape painters in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Facchinetti used a brightly colored palette and engaged in detailed facture, creating paintings that resemble those of the Italian vedutisti. He was a master of framing wide-ranging perspectives in compositions bathed by theatrical lighting. Although critics have noted that it was precisely this diligent facture that worked against the emotions he sought to capture in his work, his paintings were much appreciated, not only by coffee-planter aristocrats and members of the emerging elite of a newly independent nation but also by diplomats, traders, and foreign explorers and travelers, who looked to his “special cabinet of Brazilian views” for souvenirs of the country.

Facchinetti meticulously depicted views of Rio de Janeiro and its surroundings: the Serra do Mar (Mountains of the Sea), with its jagged relief; Baía da Guanabara (Guanabara Bay), a huge reflecting pool punctuated by islands and coves; and the vast panoramic landscapes of the mountains around Petrópolis and Teresópolis. His paintings were regularly announced in the Almanaque Laemmert (Laemmert Almanac) in six languages: Portuguese, French, English, Italian, Spanish and German. In addition to studio sales, Facchinetti received numerous commissions from a circle of admirers who wanted the painter to depict their rural properties. Facchinetti’s own notes describe commissions undertaken for the families of the barons of Rio Preto and Alfenas, who owned vast tracts of land in Minas Gerais.

Such commissions were the reason Facchinetti trekked to far-off and inaccessible areas, including São Tomé das Letras.60Facchinetti’s notes from March 1875 through June 1876 show he was commissioned for at least nine paintings: a view of a rural property, three views of São Tomé das Letras, four landscapes of the region and a portrait of the founder of the town of São Tomé das Letras. See Carlos Martins and Valéria Piccoli, Facchinetti (Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2004). This unique landscape, which is located far inland and has been shaped by the geological effects of weathering and structural tectonic processes, is extremely attractive even today. A very ancient formation, its morphological diversity includes gneiss hills interrupted by quartzite ridges. Due to their varying hardness, these hills have reacted differently to a wide range of erosion processes over time: very hard quartzite rocks, for example, produced chains of high mountains, whose outcrops form high walls that stand like citadels over an ocean of hills.

The small town of São Tomé das Letras is located near one such intricate quartzite formation on a high ridge. Panoramas open out from this unique position, drawing the eye into the far-off distance in all four cardinal directions. Presumably, Facchinetti had never come across such a natural picture, and his work shows us that he was awed by the challenge of portraying such singularity.

Facchinetti’s paintings tend to depict vast scenes enriched by meticulous specificity, instigating viewers’ curiosity as they scrutinize the painting’s details. In São Tomé das Letras, the foreground immediately draws our attention, showing vegetation deliberately interspersed with intriguing rock formations that cut diagonally across the middle of the painting like long strongholds. To the right, apparently emerging from the rocks themselves, we spot a church with houses dotted around it; this small settlement sprawls down the slopes. From the foreground, our view grasps more compositional elements that highlight the vast extension of horizon, which Facchinetti accentuates with a palette that ranges from dark tones in the foreground to gradually lighter hues toward the horizon. An ocean of hills harmoniously opens out as far as the eye can see. The entire landscape is unveiled, and the representation of such vastness lends the painting a magical atmosphere steeped in silence and stillness.

São Tomé das Letras stimulates the viewer’s imagination: the work plunges us into the infinity of landscape, an immense void set against the tenuous light of sky. And amid this vast universe we see a diminutive Facchinetti, who is shown taking shelter under a makeshift covering. It was the privilege of the artist to bear witness to this spectacle of Nature; it is ours to be awed by the spectacle of his interpretation.

Carlos Martins

Eugenio Landesio and José María Velasco, Hacienda de Monte Blanco, 1879

Hacienda de Monte Blanco (fig. 1) is perhaps one of the best examples of what Italian artist Eugenio Landesio called “pintura general” (general painting). Landesio coined the expression to refer to a particular way of conceiving and teaching landscape painting that he developed during the two decades he spent teaching at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos (Fine Arts Academy of San Carlos) in Mexico City, and that he defined in a brief treatise published in 1867.61Eugenio Landesio, La Pintura General o de Paisaje y la perspectiva en la Academia Nacional de San Carlos (Mexico City: Imprenta de Lara, 1867).

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Description: Hacienda de Monte Blanco by Landesio, Eugenio; Velasco, José María

FIG. 1 Eugenio Landesio (born Altessano, Italy, 1810; died Paris, France, 1879) and José María Velasco (born Temascalcingo, Mexico, 1840; died Mexico City, Mexico, 1912), Hacienda de Monte Blanco, 1879. Oil on canvas, 77 × 108 cm (30.32 × 42.52 in). Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz/Instituto Veracruzano de la Cultura/Museo de Arte del Estado de Veracruz. Photo by Rafael Doniz. Reproduction authorized by Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, 2015.

This theory of general painting was based strictly on optical considerations. Landesio blended local pictorial traditions that originated in colonial times, like the representation of buildings and urban landscapes,62Fausto Ramírez Rojas has defined and studied the local traditions of urban landscapes in “La construcción de la patria y el desarrollo del paisaje en el México decimonónico,” in Hacia otra historia del arte en México: La amplitud del modernismo y la modernidad (1861–1920), ed. Esther Acevedo (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes-Dirección General de Publicaciones, 2004), 269–292. with approaches rarely practiced in Mexico before his arrival, such as the representation of uninhabited natural spaces and historic landscapes. From a pedagogical viewpoint, the broad range of subjects addressed by general painting had the advantage of preparing future landscape painters to face a market that was very different from those in England or Italy, where painting styles existed as distinct genres.

When Landesio arrived in Mexico in 1855, he noticed that there was only a scarce demand for academic landscape painting, and he immediately set about trying to garner attention for the genre: he sent his students out to paint the country houses of the elite and also began to engage with the owners of mines and haciendas (plantations), who frequently commissioned Landesio during his stays in the country. One of Landesio’s last commissions was Hacienda de Monte Blanco, a painting he probably began in 1873 and had not finished when he decided to return to Rome at the end of 1877. Landesio entrusted his former student José María Velasco with the completion of the painting; two years later, Velasco presented it for the first time to the public, unsigned, at the nineteenth exhibition of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Institute of Fine Arts).63The catalogue of the exhibition reveals that Velasco initially resisted this request “because his conscience told him other hands should not touch artworks of this genre.” He must have changed his mind when Landesio, for whom he felt “great affection and thankfulness,” died in 1879. Manuel Romero de Terreros, ed., Catálogos de las exposiciones de la antigua Academia de San Carlos De México, 1850–1898, vol. 14 (Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1963), 510–511.

The painting is a view of Monte Blanco, an old hacienda that was part of the canton of Córdoba, in the state of Veracruz. It was one of the many properties owned by the commissioner of the artwork, José Francisco Amor y Escandón, a wealthy entrepreneur from a powerful family who had found a way to benefit from the complex political situation in Mexico during its first decades of independence. When it was first exhibited, Hacienda de Monte Blanco was much admired by the critics for its “good combination of lines and good choice of motives that compose the different depths.”64Anonymous, “Décima novena exposición nacional de obras de bellas artes,” El Siglo XIX Novena época 39 vol. 77 (January 21, 1880): 2. In the far-off distance, it shows the Citlaltépetl, or Pico de Orizaba, the highest volcano in Mexico. In front of this, we see a massif; the nearest hill, known as Monte Blanco, gives its name to the hacienda.

The vast lands that stretch along the left edge of the Barranca de Metlac (Metlac Ravine) dominate the center of the painting; in the foreground, the slope of a mountain located to the east of the hacienda justifies the high viewpoint and is the setting of what the theory of general painting would define as an “episodio” (episode), where human and animal figures are introduced. In the foreground, one can also see how carefully Landesio and Velasco have registered the natural vegetation of the region. The precise depiction of the biological, geological and climatic characteristics of a localidad (locality) was one of the hallmarks of general painting. Hacienda de Monte Blanco shows “ashes, holm oaks, ceiba and other trees that grow in these places,” and, in the center, a herbaceous plant typical of the tropical forest “they call Majaja (Xanthosoma robustum), with leaves that are often longer than a man’s height.”65Terreros, ed., Catálogos de las exposiciones de la antigua Academia de San Carlos De México, 510–511.

The contrast between the “snow-covered and uneven” Citlaltépetl volcano and the lush tropical vegetation recreates one of the themes most frequently displayed in nineteenth-century landscape painting in the Americas: in the words of Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, the representation “in just one glance” of “the contrasts of climates and vegetation that are the result of different heights.”66Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos, ensayo de una descripción física del mundo, vol. 1 (Belgium: Eduardo Perié, 1875), 11–13. According to Humboldt, such contrasts could be seen only in mountain ranges in the hot region of the Americas, “the part of our planet’s surface where nature gives birth to the largest variety of impressions, in the smallest extension.”67Ibid. Before Landesio and Velasco, Carlo de Paris and Johann Moritz Rugendas had already used the Citlaltépetl to represent the Mexican tropics visually, and in his Atlas Geographique et Physique du Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne (Geographic and Physic Atlas of the Kingdom of the New Spain), Humboldt himself included an etching of the volcano as seen from a thick forest. One must remember it was then thought that the Andean mountain range extended throughout the American continent and that in Mexico it had “a direct branching out in the gigantic mountains we call Sierra Madre.”68Joaquín Arróniz, Ensayo de una historia de Orizaba (Orizaba: Imprenta de J.B. Aburto, 1867), 1–2.

The marked opposition between the fertile vegetation in the foreground and the large barren lands in the center of the painting is also noteworthy. Although the Mexican bourgeoisie of the second half of the nineteenth century would hardly have associated a treeless landscape with the problem of deforestation now caused by extensive livestock farming in the tropics, they were able to discern the signs of an unproductive hacienda. Around the time this painting was made, Matías Romero, an influential Mexican intellectual who served as the country’s finance minister for many years, stated in a widely read study that the hacienda of Monte Blanco had an “excellent situation and conditions for coffee-growing” and suggested using its pastures to grow coffee beans.69Matías Romero, “Memoria sobre el cultivo del café,” El Minero Mexicano 7, no. 48 (January 27, 1881).

While the sprawling plains painted by Landesio evoke the real potential of this land, the painting also emphasizes the resources of the land’s owner. In the theory of general painting, an episode was as important as a locality, and Hacienda de Monte Blanco is a clear example of this. Here, Landesio’s episode is a complex double portrait, organized hierarchically, that emphasizes Escandón as he stands illuminated by the first rays of the sun, almost in the center of the composition. The hacienda’s owner, who is giving orders to his servants, is in complete symbolic possession of the space and the decisions concerning his property. His attitude contrasts with that of the second character on the canvas, Landesio himself, who appears in the bottom left, in semi-darkness, sitting in front of his paintbox and preparing one of the studies that he later used to make the painting.70Mexican paintings of rural properties in which the artist portrays himself alongside the owner are very scarce, but Landesio had previously made at least one other: Vista de la hacienda de Matlala (1857), in which he appears painting next to the family of the hacienda’s owner, the architect Lorenzo de la Hidalga. In the case of The Hacienda of Monte Blanco, it is particularly noteworthy that it is not only a self-portrait but also, in a way, a portrait completed by Velasco after Landesio’s death. The artist also interacts with the servants of the hacienda, but he talks with them as an equal-presumably about some characteristic of the majestic landscape surrounding them, given the inquisitive fascination with nature the artist expressed in his canvases and writings.71In addition to his treatise about general painting, Landesio published in Mexico a manual about perspective and a book about travels. For more information about this, see Alberto Nulman Magidin, “Eugenio Landesio y la Historia Natural,” M.A. thesis, UNAM, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 2009.

Alberto Nulman Magidin

Lucius R. O’Brien, Kakabeka Falls, Kamanistiquia River, 1882

Lucius Richard O’Brien made a unique contribution to Canadian visual arts through his activity as an arts administrator and his nearly fifty-year artistic career. Entrepreneurial and ambitious in a period before the development of the commercial gallery structure in Canada, O’Brien exhibited at the Toronto Mechanics’ Institute in 1851 and in the first exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA) in 1873; he was also the founding president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA).72O’Brien served as the vice-president of the Ontario Society of Artists from 1874 to 1880, and the RCA’s president from 1880 to 1890. Dennis Reid, “Chronology,” Lucius R. O’Brien: Visions of Victorian Canada (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1990), 185–188. O’Brien was predominantly a landscape painter, depicting Canadian subjects found across the country but mostly in the central region, such as Ontario’s Kakabeka Falls (fig. 1). His reception piece for the RCA, a view of Quebec’s Cape Trinity (fig. 2), is, literally and figuratively, a Canadian masterpiece.

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Description: Kakabeka Falls, Kaministiquia River by O'Brien, Lucius Richard

FIG. 1 Lucius R. O’Brien (born Shanty Bay, Ontario, Canada, 1832; died Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1899), Kakabeka Falls, Kamanistiquia River, 1882. Oil on canvas, 83.9 × 121.7 cm (33.03 × 47.91 in). National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 1935. 4255. Photo © NGC.

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Description: Sunrise on the Saguenay, Cape Trinity by O'Brien, Lucius Richard

FIG. 2 Lucius R. O’Brien, Sunrise on the Saguenay, Cape Trinity, 1880. Oil on canvas, 90 × 127 cm (35.43 × 50 in). National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts diploma work, deposited by the artist, Toronto, 1880. 113. Photo ©NGC.

Accommodating taste, aptitude and the economics of the Canadian art market, many of O’Brien’s greatest works are watercolor paintings made late in his career. The most majestic of these are vertical double-elephant sheets of the Canadian Rockies O’Brien painted in the late 1880s, when he made three trips to document the construction of the railway (fig. 3). The artist traveled across Lake Superior in September 1881 to prepare images for an immense two-volume publication, Picturesque Canada: The Country as It Was and Is (fig. 4),73Picturesque Canada: The Country as It Was and Is, ed. George Monro Grant, illustrated under the supervision of L.R. O’Brien, 2 vols. (Toronto: Belden Brothers, 1882). which derived in concept and presentation from earlier publications such as Picturesque America and Picturesque Europe that provided vistas and accounts of the natural and built wonders of their subjects.74Picturesque America: or, The Land We Live In, ed. William Cullen Bryant, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1872–1874); and Picturesque Europe: A Delineation by Pen and Pencil of the Natural Features and the Picturesque and Historical Places of Great Britain and the Continent, ed. Bayard Taylor, 3 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1875). Illustrations were central to the Picturesque series, and O’Brien both supervised the Canadian volumes’ images and prepared numerous illustrations of eastern and central scenes.75Like Kakabeka Falls, Kamanistiquia River, some of his other illustrations were developed into independent paintings, for example, Quebec from Pont Lévis, 1881, Royal Collection Trust/Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Description: Through the Rocky Mountains by O'Brien, Lucius Richard

FIG. 3 Lucius R. O’Brien, Through the Rocky Mountains, a Pass on the Canadian Highway, 1887. Watercolor on paper, 101.6 × 69.8 cm (40 × 27.5 in). Private collection.

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Description: Picturesque Canada: The Country as It was and Is by O'Brien, Lucius Richard

FIG. 4 Lucius R. O’Brien, from Picturesque Canada: The Country as It Was and Is (Toronto: Belden Bros.), 1882. Wood engraving, dimensions unknown. Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, E.P. Taylor Research Library & Archives.

When O’Brien visited Kakabeka Falls in 1881,76The Kakabeka Falls of the Kaministiquia River (current spelling) is about thirty kilometers west of Thunder Bay, Ontario, a city borne of the 1970 amalgamation of the settlements Fort William and Port Arthur. This region of Lake Superior was explored by French fur traders and missionaries in the mid-seventeenth century while the British Hudson’s Bay Company commanded the Hudson Bay watershed to the north. Beyond furs and souls, the region was of interest for the prospect of rich copper deposits and because it was thought to be a navigable route to Asia. steamships and schooners traveled through the Great Lakes, and the waterfall was the region’s principal tourist attraction. Nearby Fort William had grown from a transit point on the fur-trade route to an important staging area for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), which was being constructed westward to Winnipeg through the Woodland region of northwestern Ontario. Before the CPR reached Fort William, Kakabeka Falls was a natural wonder and an impediment to travel.77On his outbound and return journeys in 1846 and 1848, Paul Kane observed that Kakabeka Falls has a more picturesque beauty than Niagara Falls despite the lesser volume of water in its cascade. In Paul Kane, Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America, in Paul Kane’s Frontier, ed. J. Russell Harper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 63, 156. While Kakabeka Falls, Kamanistiquia River is one of many treatments that emphasizes the grandeur of the location, the waterfall was no longer an obstacle at the time of O’Brien’s visit: unlike earlier artists who had journeyed there by foot or canoe, O’Brien traveled to Kakabeka Falls from Port Arthur on a CPR construction train.78Grant, Picturesque Canada: The Country as It Was and Is, 269. Like the visits and views by Paul Kane and Frances Anne Hopkins, O’Brien’s was an admixture of political and artistic agendas, and in his case, Canada’s rising prosperity and sense of nationhood made the Picturesque Canada project relevant in a way it would not have been one generation earlier.

Painted in the middle of O’Brien’s career during an approximately five-year period of ambitious oil paintings, Kakabeka Falls, Kamanistiquia River coincides with the beginning of environmental, although not environmentalist, thinking throughout the Americas. This majestic portrayal is singular within an oeuvre replete with masterly depictions of water in its fluid and vaporous states, which recalls the 1868 painting Morning on the Upper Ottawa, by Otto Reinhold Jacobi (see below). Unlike earlier anthropological, topographical and nationalist versions of the subject, O’Brien’s work approaches the picturesque. The artist portrays human presence in a glorious natural landscape, intimating sublimity by placing two miniscule figures on a shoal. The painting’s left and right sides lead into the composition on different vectors and at different rates. The cliffs on the right stutter the view to the falls with their masses and sedimentary striations. Following the river upstream from the bottom left, to the right and then left again, and swooping down the verdant escarpment to the base of the falls, the view zigzags and slides toward the cataract’s finale of water and vapor. O’Brien’s tender treatment of the falls’ mist keeps the drama in check: most brilliant at the base, it delicately veils the geology higher within the bowl. Above and beyond, it extends infinitely like the falls’ roar. The work is far from “too happy,” as Oscar Wilde remarked when he saw, and misunderstood, Kakabeka Falls, Kamanistiquia River in Toronto at its public debut in the 1882 OSA exhibition.79“Oscar at the Gallery,” Toronto Telegram (May 25, 1882).

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Description: Morning on the Upper Ottawa by Jacobi, Otto Reinhold

Otto Reinhold Jacobi (born Königsberg, Prussia, 1812; died Ardoch, North Dakota, United States of America, 1901), Morning on the Upper Ottawa, 1868. Oil on canvas, 96.5 × 172.7 cm (38 × 68 in). Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, purchased with funds donated by AGO members, 1990. 90/40.

Coinciding with a new round of artistic, economic and national expansion into the Canadian Northwest, Kakabeka Falls, Kamanistiquia River offered a renewed vision of the Canadian landscape. While the nation grew westward in fits and starts, its destiny not manifest, the railway linked provinces and territories, and the nascent RCA clamored for encouragement, education and development that would allow Canadian artists to remain in Canada.80Lucius R. O’Brien, “To the Editor of the ‘Montreal Herald,’” in Records of the Founding of the Royal Canadian Academy by His Excellency The Marquis of Lome and Her Royal Highness The Princess Louise, 1879–80 (Toronto: Globe Printing, 1883), 13–14. In this context, the land shifted from being an adversary to becoming the subject of aesthetic interest, and O’Brien’s work held a multilayered import. Earlier views of Kakabeka Falls by Paul Kane (p. 84), William G.R. Hind and Frances Anne Hopkins (p. 100) name the site and show care in their depictions while being accounts of a specific place. O’Brien had moved beyond the limit of the named place to aestheticize the Canadian landscape in a way that would stir the spirits of late-nineteenth-century Canadians, and would be most forcefully realized in the work of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven more than a generation later.

Gregory Humeniuk

Johann Georg Grimm, View of Icaraí Point, 1884

The history of Brazilian art usually credits Johann Georg Grimm with two pioneering achievements—introducing plein air painting to Brazil and breaking with the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes (Imperial Academy of Fine Arts)—often conflating the two in a single gesture that is seen to attest to the artist’s modernizing spirit.81Among the standard references on Grimm, see Carlos Roberto Maciel Levy, O grupo Grimm: Paisagismo brasileiro no século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 1980), 20–32; Maria Elizabete Santos Peixoto, Pintores alemães no Brasil durante o século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 1989), 169–186; Isabel Sanson Portella, “Paisagem: Um conceito romântico na arte brasileira—George Grimm,” 19 & 20 3, no. 3 (July 2008); and Carlos Roberto Maciel Levy, “Johann Georg Grimm,” Saur Allgemeine Künstler Lexikon (Munich/Leipzig: K.G. Saur, 2009), vol. 62, 273–274. The primary source for this narrative is the critic Gonzaga Duque, whose 1888 magnum opus A arte brasileira (Brazilian Art) praised the recently deceased Grimm, claiming that the artist’s work had burst onto the scene in late-nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro “radiant in light and color, before our vagabond eyes, accustomed to the pale, anemic, miserably sickly tints of the majority of our landscape painters.”82Gonzaga Duque, A arte brasileira (repr., Campinas: Mercado de Letras, 1995), 193. Subsequent critics have attributed to Grimm’s landscapes the discovery of something called “Brazilian light”—a novelty the artist appears to have imported, paradoxically, from his travels through the Middle East and North Africa.

The portrayal of Grimm as a Romantic rebel, unappreciated in his time, precedes Duque. Grimm’s withdrawal from the Imperial Academy—in July 1884, after almost three years as a substitute professor—was decried as an injustice by the press, notably in a polemic fueled by Angelo Agostini, editor of the hugely influential Revista Ilustrada (Illustrated Magazine). For what it is worth, the academy did its best to prove its esteem for Grimm by awarding him a gold medal and an acquisition prize at its 1884 Salon. Many decades later, Grimm’s disciple Antônio Parreiras reduced the myth to caricature, casting his teacher’s move to the neighboring town of Niterói as a gesture of defiance. There is no doubt that Grimm advocated painting out of doors and the direct observation of nature, as befits an artist of his generation, just as it is equally certain that such practices were already in place in Brazil before his arrival.

The biggest drawback of the Grimm myth is that it masks the real complexity of his oeuvre. In an echo of the painting Vista do Rio de Janeiro tomada de Niterói (View of Rio de Janeiro Taken from Niterói) by Giovanni Battista Castagneto (see below), Grimm’s 1884 painting Vista da Ponta de Icaraí (View of Icaraí Point) (fig. 1) depicts a well-known spot in Niterói where the edges of the great rock at the end of Icaraí beach form a small cove sheltered from the waters of Baía da Guanabara (Guanabara Bay). In the foreground, to the right, four people—a man, who stands, and a woman and two children, who sit—occupy themselves with something in the sand. To their right, a red cloth, an open umbrella and a coat have been laid out on the ground, calling attention to the figures’ unencumbered state of dress. It may have rained earlier, as the low clouds on the horizon suggest, but the day is now clear and sunny. Two boats sail in the middle distance, echoing the smaller sailboat moored on the rocks. It is an ordinary scene of seaside leisure. At the time, viewers would have recognized the spot and known that the viewpoint was inside the bay—a familiar and safe haven.

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Description: View of Icaraí Point (Vista da Ponta de Icaraí) by Grimm, Georg

FIG. 1 Johann Georg Grimm (born Immenstadt, Bavaria, 1846; died Palermo, Italy, 1887), Vista da Ponta de Icaraí (View of Icaraí Point), 1884. Oil on canvas, 81.5 × 152 cm (32.08 × 59.84 in). Hecilda and Sergio Fadel Collection, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo by Jaime Acioli.

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Description: View of Rio de Janeiro Taken from Niterói (Vista do Rio de Janeiro tomada de...

Giovanni Battista Castagneto (born Genoa, Italy, 1851; died Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1900), Vista do Rio de Janeiro tomada de Niterói (View of Rio de Janeiro Taken from Niterói), 1887. Oil on canvas, 40 × 105 cm (15.75 × 41.34 in). Acervo do Instituto Ricardo Brennand, Recife, PE, Brazil. Photo by Vinicius Lubambo.

Those who uphold the Grimm myth must seek further meaning in some intangible quality, such as the “tropical light” or “Brazilianized palette” that various critics have managed to identify over the years.83See, among others, Sérgio Milliet, “Luz, paisagem, arte nacional,” in Pintura quase sempre (Porto Alegre: Livraria do Globo, 1944), 72–77; Gilda de Mello e Souza, “Pintura brasileira contemporânea: Os precursores,” Discurso 5, no. 5 (1974): 121–123; and Trajetória da luz na arte brasileira (São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2001). Yet the key to reading this painting is clearly visible and covers almost half the canvas. On the left, we see a rock rendered with a level of accuracy that elicits the viewer’s scrutiny. Every outcrop is depicted in detail; each marker of erosion is made visible and comprehensible. The painting is reminiscent of other landscapes of the period that seek to express what John Ruskin called “vital truth,” revealing through careful observation a deeper understanding of the processes behind appearances. Grimm’s painting partakes in the tradition of visualizing geological time that was hugely important to landscape painting in the nineteenth century—a tradition that has its origins in the writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder, Jacob Philipp Hackert and Alexander von Humboldt, and that found expression in the generation of painters Grimm would have encountered as a student in Munich.84Timothy F. Mitchell, Art and Science in German Landscape Painting, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 3–7, 136–137, 186–187; and Rebecca Bedell, “The History of the Earth: Darwin, Geology and Landscape,” in Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, ed. Diana Donald and Jane Munro (Cambridge, UK/New Haven, CT: Fitzwilliam Museum/Yale Center for British Art, 2009), 49–69. See also Rebecca Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (Princeton, CT: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Claudia Valladão de Mattos, Goethe e Hackert sobre a pintura de paisagem: Quadros da natureza na Europa e no Brasil (São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 2008).

View of Icaraí Point elicits, in the Brazilian context, a discussion similar to Marcia Pointon’s established reading of William Dyce’s 1858–1860 Pegwell Bay, Kent—a Recollection of October 5th 1858 (fig. 2).85Marcia Pointon, “The Representation of Time in Painting: A Study of William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay: A Recollection of October 5th, 1858,” Art History 1, no. 1 (1978): 99–103. The tiny scale of human endeavor is contrasted to the magnitude of geological time, which, in turn, reduces all things to a state of transitoriness. The strategic use of color thus acquires significance. Human action, represented by the artifacts strewn on the sand, passes as swiftly as the bright-green reflection on the water that forms a pool between the rocks on the right. The whiteness of the clothing echoes the sails and clouds, reinforcing the fact that life passes in a breath of wind. In contrast, the gray, brown and blue sobriety that dominates the composition attests to the continuity of nature in its grand processes. Meditating on the relationship between historical and geological time, Grimm’s painting underscores just how ancient the so-called New World really is.

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Description: Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th 1858 by Dyce, William

FIG. 2 William Dyce (born Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom, 1806; died London, England, United Kingdom, 1864), Pegwell Bay, Kent—a Recollection of October 5th 1858, 1858–1860. Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 88.9 cm (25 × 35 in). TATE, London, purchased, 1894. N01407. © TATE, London, 2015.

Rafael Cardoso

George Inness, Summer Evening, Montclair, New Jersey, 1892

In 1882, George Inness rented a studio in the Holbein Building on West 55th Street in New York City, the last of several workspaces he occupied in the city over the course of his career, which began in the 1840s.86For biographical information about George Inness, see Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., The Life and Work of George Inness (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977); Cikovsky Jr., George Inness (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993); and Michael Quick, George Inness: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). The artist Elliott Daingerfield, who also had a studio in the Holbein, recalled the sight of Inness arriving on the morning train from his home in Montclair, New Jersey, where he had lived since 1878: “I have stood across the street and watched him as he walked from the elevated railroad station to his studio, and in every movement he showed haste and eagerness to get to the easel where some picture was baffling his best effort, or where some new theme that surged within his mind might find expression.”87Elliott Daingerfield, “Inness: Genius of American Art,” in George Inness: Writings and Reflections on Art and Philosophy, ed. Adrienne Baxter Bell (New York: George Braziller, 2006), 210. Originally published in Cosmopolitan 55, no. 4 (September 1913): 518–525. By 1892, when Inness painted the serene and atmospheric work Summer Evening, Montclair, New Jersey (fig. 1), age and infirmity had forced him to rely more frequently on the studio adjacent to his country home. Yet Daingerfield’s reminiscence aptly captures the elder artist’s famously driven persona and its close association with the transcendent visions of nature that took form on his canvases. Alongside other modern city workers, Inness commuted from the suburbs to pursue his ambitions. It was the combined philosophical and metaphysical tenor of his stated aspirations—to paint “the civilized landscape” and to “teach the world to see reality in a new light”—that distinguished him from his fellow travelers.88George Inness, “A Painter on Painting,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 56 (February 1878): 61; and Inness in G.W. Sheldon, “George Inness,” Harper’s Weekly Magazine 26, no. 1, 322 (April 22, 1882): 44.

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Description: Summer Evening, Montclair, New Jersey by Inness, George, Sr.

FIG. 1 George Inness (born Newburgh, New York, United States of America, 1825; died Bridge of Allan, Scotland, United Kingdom, 1894), Summer Evening, Montclair, New Jersey, 1892. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 114.3 cm (30 × 45 in). Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, United States of America, The Lunder Collection. 2013.157.

The Montclair landscape was inspiring to the artist, and in this respect it was a resource comparable to other natural settings he had encountered. Yet Inness did not need to be in the midst of verdant splendors to benefit from them creatively. On the contrary, removing himself from his inspirations was essential to his artistic evolution. Summer Evening, Montclair, New Jersey exemplifies the highly refined, individualized style that he perfected in the last decade of his life, when he achieved the pictorial unity he had been seeking throughout his career.89Rachael Ziady DeLue has written extensively on Inness’s statements on the value of unity. See Rachael Ziady DeLue, “Painting Unity,” in George Inness and the Science of Landscape (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 59–88. For a discussion of Inness’s variability (and lack of unity), see Cikovsky Jr., The Life and Work of George Inness, 280–284. Inness was not a self-taught artist, as he was apt to suggest, but his formal education was significantly limited by a childhood diagnosis of epilepsy, which may have cultivated, or simply necessitated, a lifelong independent streak and an aptitude for auto-didacticism.90George Inness to Ripley Hitchcock, March 23, 1884, in Baxter Bell, ed., George Inness, 128. His most significant influences—the contemporary Barbizon painters, whose works he saw during trips to Europe in the 1850s, and his encounter, around 1864, with the teachings of the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg—precipitated several decades of artistic experimentation that came to fruition in his late paintings. Emulating and adapting aspects of the Barbizon style after 1854, Inness developed a loosened brush stroke, a greater sensitivity to natural color and a preference for rustic subjects that deepened and solidified his association with French art. The impact of his Swedenborgian faith on his art was less direct and immediate, but it emerged with vital clarity in the 1880s and 1890s.91For the impact of Inness’s Swedenborgian faith on his art, see Adrienne Baxter Bell, George Inness and the Visionary Landscape (New York: National Academy of Design, 2003).

Swedenborg taught that all aspects of the material world shelter a corresponding spiritual realm that gives life to matter by means of a continual influx of spiritual essence. In Summer Evening, Montclair, New Jersey, the pervading weight of humid mid-summer air, achieved with glazes and softly integrated brush strokes in dusky tones, blurs distinctions between forms, joining them in a shared expression of harmonious interrelation. The painting depicts three figures: two seated in a field and one standing on or walking along a road that bisects the composition near the horizon, dividing it in half along the horizontal axis. An opening between flanking stands of trees further divides the composition, roughly at its center, along the vertical axis. The resulting sense of balance amid the diversity of the natural realm deepens the illusion of a timeless agrarian ideal that coexists in a wondrous, irreconcilable union, with the wistfulness that accompanies the fleeting moments before darkness. Inness’s ability to duplicate this compositional structure in other late works without, for the most part, repeating specific motifs and arrangements speaks to the mastery he had rightfully earned through the concerted practice of his art.92For a discussion of one instance when Inness copied one of his subjects, see Lauren Lessing, “George Inness, Brush Burning, 1884,” in The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Paintings to 1945, ed. Margaret C. Conrads, vol. 1 (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 344.

Nellie M. Linn, the wife of the prominent Chicago merchant William R. Linn, was the first owner of this painting, and she is acknowledged as the lender of it and two other oils to an exhibition of the artist’s work at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1895.93George Inness, Art Institute of Chicago, March 1–17, 1895. The two other works loaned by Linn were Medfield, Massachusetts (1861) and Hillside (undated). She would likely have seen the exhibition of Inness’s paintings at the World’s Columbian Exposition, mounted in Chicago in 1893, and her own collection must have graced the walls of her family’s handsome home on South Michigan Avenue, which was designed by Daniel Hudson Burnham and John Wellborn Root, the consulting architects for the exposition. Whether encountered in the splendorous bustle of a fairground pavilion or in the orchestrated serenity of a Gilded Age interior, Inness’s intimate visions of nature offered a much-needed respite from the demands and the seductions of modern life.

Elizabeth Finch

Maurice Cullen, Ice Harvest, 1914

A few months after La coupe de la glace (Ice Harvest) (fig. 1) was first exhibited, in early 1914 in Montreal,9431st Spring Exhibition, Art Association of Montreal, March 27—April 25, 1914, no. 87. this spectacular work by painter Maurice Galbraith Cullen was featured in The Studio, a prestigious international art monthly.95H.M.L., “Studio-Talk-Montreal,” The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art 62, no. 258 (September 15, 1914): 312. In fact, the same edition also included a color illustration of another work by Cullen, Frost and Snow (1914, private collection), presented at the 31st Spring Exhibition. There is nothing surprising about this choice, as it showcased the work of an artist famous for his powerful and colorful images of the Canadian winter. In his youth, Cullen had attended the Ecole des beaux-arts (School of Fine Arts) in Paris as part of his seven-year training journey in Europe, a period during which he became familiar with plein air painting and the light effects used by the Impressionists. After returning to Canada, he became known as a sincere and passionate interpreter of snow-covered scenes. Quebec City, Montreal, the Côte-de-Beaupré (Beaupré coast) and the Laurentides (Laurentian Mountains) inspired Cullen to paint striking compositions based on the play and variations of daylight from dawn to dusk.

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Description: Ice Harvest (La coupe de la glace) by Cullen, Maurice Galbraith

FIG. 1 Maurice Cullen (born St. John’s, Newfoundland Colony, 1866; died Chambly, Quebec, Canada, 1934), La coupe de la glace (Ice Harvest), 1914. Oil on canvas, 144.1 × 177.5 cm (56.7 × 69.9 in). Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec, purchase, A. Sidney Dawes Fund. Inv.1941.729. Photo courtesy of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Cullen was fascinated by the wild, but he was also attentive to the challenges involved in adapting to a wintry climate: using urban transit in a blinding blizzard, lugging heavy logs over the snowy and steep hills of Beaupré or navigating the mouth of the frozen Fleuve St. Laurent (St. Lawrence River) facing Quebec City. Ice held a particular fascination for the artist, who loved to render its variable textures, nuances and colors as the light changed and the seasons progressed. Despite extreme weather conditions, Cullen would regularly venture out to Quebec’s waterways to observe the ice harvest, an activity that was crucial to the conservation of food.

In the St. Lawrence River valley in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the ice harvest had become a specialized practice, prospering until mechanical refrigeration became widespread in the 1950s.96Yves Bergeron, “L’exploitation de la glace naturelle au Québec,” M.A. thesis, Université Laval, 1984. In January and February, hundreds of thousands of tons of ice were cut into thick blocks and transported to huge urban warehouses, where they were stored until spring and then sold for food preservation. A core business in northern communities at this time, the sale of ice extended to public institutions, major hotels, pubs, hospitals and the homes of individuals who had their own coolers. In order to get a sense of the importance of this now-vanished industry, one only needs to recall the activities of the Haynes & DeWitt Ice Company, which operated in the Montreal area at the end of the nineteenth century. Over a ten-day period, the company would employ more than 200 workers to carve out and prepare the blocks of ice. Then, another group of 150 men would ride heavily laden horse-drawn sleds to a Montreal warehouse, which could house up to 46,000 tons of ice.97Canadian Illustrated News (April 15, 1882): 232, in Mary Fallis Jones, La Patrie québécoise au debut de la Confederation (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1980), 55.

A dozen pictorial variations on the ice harvest created between 1906 and 1932 are proof of Cullen’s great interest in this theme.98My thanks to Eric Klinkhoff of Montreal, who is working on Maurice Cullen’s descriptive catalogue, for kindly sharing this information. The artist captured the scene shown in Ice Harvest in Longueuil, just east of Pont Victoria (Victoria Bridge). The viewer can see Montreal stretching out in the distance: a thin horizontal line veiled by the steam and smoke that emanates from the factories and blends with the rich atmospheric effects of the white sun. Beneath this grandiose sky, in loosely rendered impasto, Cullen has confined the act of loading and transporting the ice to one-third of the canvas area, using curves and diagonal lines to provide a sense of distance.

At first, the eye is drawn to the broad, oblique cut in the frozen surface, which leads to the hoisting ramp. It is tangible proof of the work that was done prior to the loading of the ice, as is the accumulation of snow, ice plows and abandoned blocks on either side of the ramp. Cold and relentless winds harden the St. Lawrence River, which allows it to support considerable weights; Cullen demonstrates this by showing twenty horses waiting on the bluish surface for a load being handled by workers wielding long hooks. The dark mass and the reflection in the water constitute the tension point of this remarkable painting, in which the forces of nature meet those imposed by man on his environment.

Michèle Grandbois

1 See Steven C. Topik, “Coffee,” in The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequén, and Oil during the Oil Boom, 1850–1930, ed. Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998), 37–84; Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973, 1997). »

2 On the historical alignment of landscape painting and the economic outlook of the landowning classes, see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). This view is taken up by several essays included in W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (Chicago/London:: University of Chicago Press, 2002). »

3 On timbering in Brazil, see Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). »

4 J. Russell Harper, Krieghoff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 94. Art historian Marylin J. McKay points out that the subject of Canada’s natural wealth and timber resources became especially popular for artists following Confederation because “allusions to the extraction of wealth from the wild” in some way reinforced the purpose and strength of the new country. Marylin J. McKay, Picturing the Land, Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500–1950 (Montreal: McGill-Queen University Press, 2011), 147. »

5 Hunter Mountain, Twilight was selected to represent the art of the United States at the 1867 Paris Exposition. The painting was purchased by James Pinchot, whose son, Gifford Pinchot, named for the artist, would later promote timber as a renewable resource as the first director of the United States Forestry Service. Kevin J. Avery and Franklin Kelly, eds., Hudson River School Visions: The Landscape Paintings of Sanford R. Gifford (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2003), 175–178. Likewise, Cornelius Krieghoff’s 1862 painting Sillery Cove, Quebec, which depicts the gathering of logs at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, represented Canada’s abundant resources in timber at the Paris Exposition. Arlene Gemacher, “Canada in Paris: Krieghoff at the Universal Exhibition 1867,” Journal of Canadian History 24 (2003): 23. »

6 This is not to say that plantations are entirely absent in the visual culture of the period. For an analysis of available images, see John Michael Vlach, The Planter’s Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Angela D. Mack and Stephen G. Hoffius, eds., Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, in cooperation with the Gibbes Museum of Art, 2008). »

7 As slavery waned in Brazil in the 1870s and 80s before finally being abolished in 1889, concerns lingered over the labor supply for coffee plantations. During these decades, planters increasingly employed free laborers—rural peasants, Italian and Portuguese immigrants—in the crop’s cultivation, eventually making wage labor more profitable than slave. Edwin Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 253. The six paintings depicting the Fazenda Santa Gertrudes, in today’s Santa Gertrudes, were sent by the Brazilian government to be presented at the St. Louis Universal Exposition in 1903. See Alexandre Luiz Rocha, “Fazenda Santa Gertrudes: Modelo de Produção Cafeeira no Oeste Paulista (1895–1930),” Ph.D. dissertation (São Paulo: FAU-USP, 2008), 161. »

8 Jeremy Adelman, Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). »

9 For a sampling of culturally inflected analyses of such spaces, see Beatriz Rivera-Barnes and Jerry Hoeg, Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). See also Laura Malosetti Costa’s essay in this volume, pages 180–184. »

10 “After dark, the pampas become the domain of Pampas Indians, who had been sought out as allies in the struggle for independence, but became ‘fearsome and unknown’ enemies of the modern state. Lurking in this darkness was for Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and other writers that ‘dark and bastard heritage’ made up of indigenous societies, slave and ex-slave populations that seemed an obstacle to the aspirations of Europeanizing creóles.” Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 182. See also Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Civilization and Barbarism: Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga (1846), quoted in Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 183. »

11 Nathaniel Parker Willis, American Scenery, or, Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature, vols. 1 and 2 (London: George Virtue, 1840); and Canadian Scenery, Illustrated, vols. 1 and 2 (London: George Virtue, 1842). »

12 See Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (London: John Murray, 1830); and Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 181. On geology and its influence on U.S. landscape painting in the nineteenth century, see Rebecca Bailey Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). »

13 See Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (January 1836): 1–12; and Asher B. Durand, “Letters on Landscape Painting,” in Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape, ed. Linda S. Ferber (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum of Art, in association with D. Giles Limited, 2007), 231–252. »

14 José Joaquín Prieto and Joaquín Tocornal, “Discurso ante el congreso,” in Amunátegui Aldunate and Miguel Luis, Los precursores de la independencia de Chile, vol. 3 (Santiago: Imprenta, Litografía i Encuadernación Barcelona, 1870), 590. »

15 While some of the first national emblems in the region alluded to the Indigenous past, most of these did not endure. Such references—many of which emerged in the Río de la Plata, and from there reached Chile and Peru—abounded mainly in countries where ethnicity was not a central political issue. In most places, they were replaced early on by emblems relating to natural resources. For the Great Colombia, see Georges Lomné, “El ‘espejo roto’ de la Colombia bolivariana (1820–1850),” in Inventando la Nación: Iberoamérica, Siglo XIX, ed. Antonio Annino and François-Xavier Guerra (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003), 475–500. On the passage from cultural to natural emblems in Peru, see Natalia Majluf, “Los fabricantes de emblemas: Los símbolos nacionales en la transición republicana. Perú, 1820–1825,” in Visión y símbolos: Del virreinato criollo a la república peruana, ed. Ramón Mujica (Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 2006), 203–241. »

16 Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, Digital Research Library, 2009), 12–22. »

17 Majluf, “Los fabricantes de emblemas.” »

18 See, among others, Katherine Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); and Pablo Diener, Rugendas, 1802–1858 (Augsburg: Wissner, 1997). »

19 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 181. »

20 Ibid., 173. Pratt, however, sets Bello’s poem against the commercial impulses of the “capitalist vanguard.” »

21 There is a vast literature on the absence of landscape in the Spanish tradition, from Julio Caro Baroja to Francisco Calvo Serraller. Nonetheless, Luisa Elena Alcalá has argued in favor of a differentiated tradition, founded on the religious and political functions of landscape. Luisa Elena Alcalá, “‘A Call to Action’: Visual Persuasion in a Spanish American Painting,” Art Bulletin 94, no. 4 (December 2012): 594–617. »

22 See, among many others, Antonio González Bueno, La expedición botánica al Virreinato del Perú (1777–1788) (Madrid: Lunwerg, 1988); and María Pilar de San Pío Aladren, Mutis y la Real Expedición Botánica del Nuevo Reyno de Granada, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Lunwerg, 1992). For a summary in English of the vast literature produced in America and Spain on the scientific expeditions to Hispanic America, see Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire. Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2012). »

23 Natalia Majluf, Tipos del Perú: La Lima criolla de Pancho Fierro (Madrid: El Viso, the Hispanic Society of America, 2008). »

24 Natalia Majluf, “Traces of an Absent Landscape: Photographers in Andean Visual Culture,” History of Photography 24, no. 2 (summer 2000): 91–100. »

25 Natalia Majluf, “De la pintura y de otras técnicas del progreso. Manuel Ugalde, pintor y explorador del sur andino,” in Homenaje, ed. Félix Denegri Luna (Lima: Fondo Editorial, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2000), 393–416. »

26 Alexandra Kennedy-Troya, ed., Escenarios para una patria: Paisajismo ecuatoriano, 1850–1950 (Quito: Museo de la Ciudad, 2008). »

27 See Stübel’s fascinating discussion of the advantages of painting with respect to the “monotonous grey of mediocre photographs” and the limitations of other visual records in his preface to Alphons Stübel, Las montañas del Ecuador retratadas y descritas geológica-topográficamente, trans. Federico Yépez (Quito: Banco Central de Ecuador/UNESCO, 2004), 43. »

28 Martin S. Stabb, In Quest of Identity: Patterns in the Spanish American Essay of Ideas, 1890–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967). »

29 W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). »

30 Peter Hulme offers a compelling analysis of these phenomena in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London/New York: Methuen, 1986). »

31 Katherine Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989). Manthorne offers additional important insights into Caribbean landscape painting in “Plantation Pictures in the Americas, circa 1880: Land, Power and Resistance,” Nepantla: A View from the South 2 (2001): 317–353. »

32 Landscape, Trinidad, c. 1921, Collection of the National Gallery of Canada. On Morrice, see James Wilson Morrice, 1865–1924 (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1985), as well as the brief biographies Lucie Doráis, J.W. Morrice (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1985); and Wayne Larsen, James Wilson Morrice: Painter of Light and Shadow (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008). »

33 Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 58. See also Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth Century British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 143; Mia Bagneris, “Reimagining Race, Class and Identity in the New World” in Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, ed. Richard Aste (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2013), especially 179; and Edward J. Sullivan, From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oiler and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2014), chap. 1. »

34 William Clark, Ten Views of the Island of Antigua: In Which Are Represented the Process of Sugar Making and the Employment of the Negroes (London: T. Clay, 1823). »

35 Richard S. Dunn, “Slave Production and Slave Women in Jamaica,” in Civilization and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville/London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 50–51. »

36 See Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), chap. 2. »

37 On Cazabon, see Geoffrey MacLean, An Illustrated Biography of Trinidad’s Nineteenth Century Painter Michel Jean Cazabon (Port of Spain: Aquarela Galleries, 1986); and Amar Wahab, Colonial Inventions: Landscape, Power and Representation in Nineteenth-Century Trinidad (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Wahab provides an in-depth summary of the various theoretical approaches to Caribbean landscape of the nineteenth century, centering his arguments on those artists who depicted Trinidad. »

38 Wahab, Colonial Inventions, 113–158. »

39 Throughout the nineteenth century, there were many French artists whose influence was definitive in the Caribbean and beyond. In Cuba, Frederic Mialhe created important scenes of the cities and the countryside between 1838 and 1854. As seen in this essay, Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller’s exchanges with his French contemporaries were definitive for the formation of his mature style. Further afield, the Brazilian nineteenth-century modes of painting and sculpture were influenced by the presence, beginning in 1816, of the French Artistic Mission, a group of painters, sculptors and architects invited by local authorities to “modernize” Brazilian art. »

40 See Victor Patricio Landaluze (1830–1889) (Bilbao: Museo de Bellas Artes, 1998); and Ε. Carmen Ramos, “Victor Patricio Landaluze and Nineteenth Century Cuban Politics,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2011. »

41 1874, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, Cuba. »

42 By contrast, the illustrations by Mialhe for the 1857 book Los ingenios (with a text by plantation owner Justo G. Cantero documenting the modernization of the sugar industry) were markedly more precise and objective renditions of the new forms of machinery and practices in the processing of this commodity. See the modern edition (Madrid: Centra de Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas, 2005). »

43 See Osiris Delgado Mercado, Francisco Oller (1833–1917): Pintor de Puerto Rico (San Juan: Centro de Estudios Superiores de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, 1983) and Francisco Oller: A Realist-Impressionist (Museo de Arte de Ponce, 1983); and Sullivan, From San Juan to Paris and Back. »

44 C. 1897, Ateneo Puertorriqueño, San Juan. »

45 Osiris Delgado Mercado, Ramón Frade León. Pintor Puertorriqueño (1875–1954) (San Juan: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, 1989). »

46 1905, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan. »

47 The WPA and the FSA were both U.S.-government projects that addressed the effects of the Great Depression of 1929. They were in existence for a number of years after the worst effects of the economic downturn were eliminated. Artists associated with these initiatives were painters, draftsmen, muralists and photographers. The FSA was especially concerned with addressing poverty in the rural areas of the U.S. and its territories, including Puerto Rico, as well as documenting the debilitating effects of economic hardship. »

48 Notícia do Palácio da Academia (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Nacional, 1842), 50–51. »

49 Ibid. »

50 Alfredo Galvão, “Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre, sua influencia na Academia Imperial e no meio artístico nacional,” Revista do Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional 14 (1959): 52. »

51 See Luciano Migliaccio, Século XIX: Catálogo Mostra do redescobrimento Brasil + 500 (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal, 2000). »

52 Elaine Dias, Paisagem e Academia: Félix Émile Taunay e o Brasil. 1824–1851 (Campinas: Ed. da Unicamp, 2009). »

53 These include German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, Bavarian botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and German naturalist Rudolf Philippi, who moved to Chile in 1851 and studied issues such as clear-cutting on the sites of plantations. I am grateful to art historian Catalina Valdés for this information. »

54 Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, A viagem de von Martius: Flora Brasiliensis, vol. 1 (Rio de Janeiro: Index, 1996), 75. »

55 One 1833 article by Cunha Barboza was titled “Speech on Abusive Tree Felling in Upper Valleys and Burning Off Vegetation” and another in 1836 by Conde de Gestas was titled “Memorandum on Abusive Tree Felling and Cutting.” The magazine was published by the Sociedade Auxiliadora da Indústria Nacional, of which Félix Émile Taunay was a member. See José Luiz Werneck da Silva, Isto é o que me parece: A Sociedade Auxiliadora da Indústria Nacional (1827–1904) na formação social brasileira (Niterói: UFF, 1979), 88. »

56 Carlos [Charles] Taunay, Manual do Agricultor Brasileiro (repr., São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 2001). See José Augusto Pádua, Um Sopro de Destruição (Rio de Janeiro: JZE, 2004); and Cláudia Valladão de Mattos, “Paisagem, monumento e crítica ambiental na obra de Félix-Émile Taunay,” in Oitocentos: Arte Brasileira do Império à Primeira República, ed. Ana Maria Cavalcanti, Camila Dazzi and Arthur Valle (Rio de Janeiro: EBA/UFRJ/DezenoveVinte, 2008). »

57 Jornal do Commercio, December 18, 1842. »

58 Josefina de la Maza, “Duelo de pinceles: Ernesto Charton y Alejandro Ciccarelli. Pintura y enseñanza en el siglo XIX chileno,” in Vínculos artísticos entre Italia y América. Silencio historiográfico, ed. Fernando Guzmán and Juan Manuel Martínez (Santiago: Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez/Museo Histórico Nacional/CREA, 2012), 218–220. »

59 From this group of young painters, Onofre Jarpa stands out; his work is discussed on pages 44–45 of this volume. »

60 Facchinetti’s notes from March 1875 through June 1876 show he was commissioned for at least nine paintings: a view of a rural property, three views of São Tomé das Letras, four landscapes of the region and a portrait of the founder of the town of São Tomé das Letras. See Carlos Martins and Valéria Piccoli, Facchinetti (Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2004). »

61 Eugenio Landesio, La Pintura General o de Paisaje y la perspectiva en la Academia Nacional de San Carlos (Mexico City: Imprenta de Lara, 1867). »

62 Fausto Ramírez Rojas has defined and studied the local traditions of urban landscapes in “La construcción de la patria y el desarrollo del paisaje en el México decimonónico,” in Hacia otra historia del arte en México: La amplitud del modernismo y la modernidad (1861–1920), ed. Esther Acevedo (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes-Dirección General de Publicaciones, 2004), 269–292. »

63 The catalogue of the exhibition reveals that Velasco initially resisted this request “because his conscience told him other hands should not touch artworks of this genre.” He must have changed his mind when Landesio, for whom he felt “great affection and thankfulness,” died in 1879. Manuel Romero de Terreros, ed., Catálogos de las exposiciones de la antigua Academia de San Carlos De México, 1850–1898, vol. 14 (Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1963), 510–511. »

64 Anonymous, “Décima novena exposición nacional de obras de bellas artes,” El Siglo XIX Novena época 39 vol. 77 (January 21, 1880): 2. »

65 Terreros, ed., Catálogos de las exposiciones de la antigua Academia de San Carlos De México, 510–511. »

66 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos, ensayo de una descripción física del mundo, vol. 1 (Belgium: Eduardo Perié, 1875), 11–13. »

67 Ibid. »

68 Joaquín Arróniz, Ensayo de una historia de Orizaba (Orizaba: Imprenta de J.B. Aburto, 1867), 1–2. »

69 Matías Romero, “Memoria sobre el cultivo del café,” El Minero Mexicano 7, no. 48 (January 27, 1881). »

70 Mexican paintings of rural properties in which the artist portrays himself alongside the owner are very scarce, but Landesio had previously made at least one other: Vista de la hacienda de Matlala (1857), in which he appears painting next to the family of the hacienda’s owner, the architect Lorenzo de la Hidalga. In the case of The Hacienda of Monte Blanco, it is particularly noteworthy that it is not only a self-portrait but also, in a way, a portrait completed by Velasco after Landesio’s death. »

71 In addition to his treatise about general painting, Landesio published in Mexico a manual about perspective and a book about travels. For more information about this, see Alberto Nulman Magidin, “Eugenio Landesio y la Historia Natural,” M.A. thesis, UNAM, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 2009. »

72 O’Brien served as the vice-president of the Ontario Society of Artists from 1874 to 1880, and the RCA’s president from 1880 to 1890. Dennis Reid, “Chronology,” Lucius R. O’Brien: Visions of Victorian Canada (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1990), 185–188. »

73 Picturesque Canada: The Country as It Was and Is, ed. George Monro Grant, illustrated under the supervision of L.R. O’Brien, 2 vols. (Toronto: Belden Brothers, 1882). »

74 Picturesque America: or, The Land We Live In, ed. William Cullen Bryant, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1872–1874); and Picturesque Europe: A Delineation by Pen and Pencil of the Natural Features and the Picturesque and Historical Places of Great Britain and the Continent, ed. Bayard Taylor, 3 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1875). »

75 Like Kakabeka Falls, Kamanistiquia River, some of his other illustrations were developed into independent paintings, for example, Quebec from Pont Lévis, 1881, Royal Collection Trust/Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. »

76 The Kakabeka Falls of the Kaministiquia River (current spelling) is about thirty kilometers west of Thunder Bay, Ontario, a city borne of the 1970 amalgamation of the settlements Fort William and Port Arthur. This region of Lake Superior was explored by French fur traders and missionaries in the mid-seventeenth century while the British Hudson’s Bay Company commanded the Hudson Bay watershed to the north. Beyond furs and souls, the region was of interest for the prospect of rich copper deposits and because it was thought to be a navigable route to Asia. »

77 On his outbound and return journeys in 1846 and 1848, Paul Kane observed that Kakabeka Falls has a more picturesque beauty than Niagara Falls despite the lesser volume of water in its cascade. In Paul Kane, Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America, in Paul Kane’s Frontier, ed. J. Russell Harper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 63, 156. »

78 Grant, Picturesque Canada: The Country as It Was and Is, 269. Like the visits and views by Paul Kane and Frances Anne Hopkins, O’Brien’s was an admixture of political and artistic agendas, and in his case, Canada’s rising prosperity and sense of nationhood made the Picturesque Canada project relevant in a way it would not have been one generation earlier. »

79 “Oscar at the Gallery,” Toronto Telegram (May 25, 1882). »

80 Lucius R. O’Brien, “To the Editor of the ‘Montreal Herald,’” in Records of the Founding of the Royal Canadian Academy by His Excellency The Marquis of Lome and Her Royal Highness The Princess Louise, 1879–80 (Toronto: Globe Printing, 1883), 13–14. »

81 Among the standard references on Grimm, see Carlos Roberto Maciel Levy, O grupo Grimm: Paisagismo brasileiro no século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 1980), 20–32; Maria Elizabete Santos Peixoto, Pintores alemães no Brasil durante o século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 1989), 169–186; Isabel Sanson Portella, “Paisagem: Um conceito romântico na arte brasileira—George Grimm,” 19 & 20 3, no. 3 (July 2008); and Carlos Roberto Maciel Levy, “Johann Georg Grimm,” Saur Allgemeine Künstler Lexikon (Munich/Leipzig: K.G. Saur, 2009), vol. 62, 273–274. »

82 Gonzaga Duque, A arte brasileira (repr., Campinas: Mercado de Letras, 1995), 193. »

83 See, among others, Sérgio Milliet, “Luz, paisagem, arte nacional,” in Pintura quase sempre (Porto Alegre: Livraria do Globo, 1944), 72–77; Gilda de Mello e Souza, “Pintura brasileira contemporânea: Os precursores,” Discurso 5, no. 5 (1974): 121–123; and Trajetória da luz na arte brasileira (São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2001). »

84 Timothy F. Mitchell, Art and Science in German Landscape Painting, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 3–7, 136–137, 186–187; and Rebecca Bedell, “The History of the Earth: Darwin, Geology and Landscape,” in Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, ed. Diana Donald and Jane Munro (Cambridge, UK/New Haven, CT: Fitzwilliam Museum/Yale Center for British Art, 2009), 49–69. See also Rebecca Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (Princeton, CT: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Claudia Valladão de Mattos, Goethe e Hackert sobre a pintura de paisagem: Quadros da natureza na Europa e no Brasil (São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 2008). »

85 Marcia Pointon, “The Representation of Time in Painting: A Study of William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay: A Recollection of October 5th, 1858,” Art History 1, no. 1 (1978): 99–103. »

86 For biographical information about George Inness, see Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., The Life and Work of George Inness (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977); Cikovsky Jr., George Inness (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993); and Michael Quick, George Inness: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). »

87 Elliott Daingerfield, “Inness: Genius of American Art,” in George Inness: Writings and Reflections on Art and Philosophy, ed. Adrienne Baxter Bell (New York: George Braziller, 2006), 210. Originally published in Cosmopolitan 55, no. 4 (September 1913): 518–525. »

88 George Inness, “A Painter on Painting,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 56 (February 1878): 61; and Inness in G.W. Sheldon, “George Inness,” Harper’s Weekly Magazine 26, no. 1, 322 (April 22, 1882): 44. »

89 Rachael Ziady DeLue has written extensively on Inness’s statements on the value of unity. See Rachael Ziady DeLue, “Painting Unity,” in George Inness and the Science of Landscape (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 59–88. For a discussion of Inness’s variability (and lack of unity), see Cikovsky Jr., The Life and Work of George Inness, 280–284. »

90 George Inness to Ripley Hitchcock, March 23, 1884, in Baxter Bell, ed., George Inness, 128. »

91 For the impact of Inness’s Swedenborgian faith on his art, see Adrienne Baxter Bell, George Inness and the Visionary Landscape (New York: National Academy of Design, 2003). »

92 For a discussion of one instance when Inness copied one of his subjects, see Lauren Lessing, “George Inness, Brush Burning, 1884,” in The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Paintings to 1945, ed. Margaret C. Conrads, vol. 1 (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 344. »

93 George Inness, Art Institute of Chicago, March 1–17, 1895. The two other works loaned by Linn were Medfield, Massachusetts (1861) and Hillside (undated). »

94 31st Spring Exhibition, Art Association of Montreal, March 27—April 25, 1914, no. 87. »

95 H.M.L., “Studio-Talk-Montreal,” The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art 62, no. 258 (September 15, 1914): 312. In fact, the same edition also included a color illustration of another work by Cullen, Frost and Snow (1914, private collection), presented at the 31st Spring Exhibition. »

96 Yves Bergeron, “L’exploitation de la glace naturelle au Québec,” M.A. thesis, Université Laval, 1984. »

97 Canadian Illustrated News (April 15, 1882): 232, in Mary Fallis Jones, La Patrie québécoise au debut de la Confederation (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1980), 55. »

98 My thanks to Eric Klinkhoff of Montreal, who is working on Maurice Cullen’s descriptive catalogue, for kindly sharing this information. »

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