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| William Havell - Garden Scene on the Braganza Shore - Harbour in Rio de Janeiro - 1827 |
Following the threat of Napoleon's advancing armies, in 1808 the Portuguese Court fled to Brazil. With the consequent opening of Brazilian ports to friendly nations, and especially after Independence in 1822, Rio de Janeiro saw the arrival of foreigners engaged in a wide variety of activities, both amateurs with a knowledge of drawing and professional artists from various countries. Diplomatic and scientific missions sought to establish contact with the only Empire in South America. Passengers on world tours also anchored in Brazilian harbours. Generally speaking they were educated in the aesthetics of painting and had a desire to experience the spectacular scenery.
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| Manufacture des Gobelins The Fisherman Tapestry |
The appearance of a Brazilian landscape is on the one hand the product of an aesthetic-scientific view, as evidenced by the work of several well-known artists attached to expeditions. On the other hand, it is possible to note the emergence of a poetic view in harmony with the views of the travellers. The taste for the exotic, the strange and the unusual is inseparable from travel itself. It is not necessary to decide if travelling is undertaken to indulge a taste for something different or if the traveller gradually develops a taste for such things; it is enough to note the close relationship between them. Travel has always been an efficient means or method to leave behind the day to day environment and the realm of sameness in order to experience otherness. We should not underestimate the power of seeing when it is directed towards a world with which we have not become familiarized. We should recognise, in the context of this relationship between the individual and a world which is strange to him, the absence of a host of meanings imposed by culture, by repeated use, by learning patterns. We might also say that visibility improves inconditions of lesser intelligibility.
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| Manufacture des Gobelins The Indian Hunter Tapestry |
The traveller values the experiences of departure, division, alternation which he undergoes in place of his normal, usual, and permanent mode of life. The "romantic" journey not only leads to the adoption of another viewpoint, but sees a gain in the emotions of breaking old habits. It trains one to see alternative viewpoints, develops the ability to move from subject to subject and to see things from the outside and the inside. In short, it encourages multiple points of view, both individual and cultural.
Instead of adopting an a priori concept of landscape, it is preferable to ask what 19th century Brazil had to offer and what models of perception enabled an outline to be made of the sensible world and the configuration of what is conventionally referred to as landscape. Or, more precisely, we must ask how certain ways of perception from 19th century Europe blended with the stimuli from the topography, geography, vegetation and ways of life of Brazil. The panoramic view was the landscape model par excellence to meet the yearning for a universal vision and to give the widest possible range for the field of perception. In many cases the panorama embraces topography in a documentary way, such as in Largo da Carioca in 1816 and Morro de Santo Antonio in 1816, both painted by Nicolas Antoine Taunay in the year in which he arrived in Rio de Janeiro with the French Artistic Mission. The continual extension of the view to the horizon often demands the use of various fields of vision.
The lithographs of the Picturesque Journey of Johann Moritz Rugendas served as a motif for Vues du Bresil, arranged by the painter J.J. Deltil and printed by the Zuber wallpaper factory in Rixheim, Alsace, in 1830. The panoramic view is associated with an illusionist effect, if we recall that the panoramic spectacle, fashionable in Europe in the last part of the 18th century and during the 19th century - a device invented by the Baker brothers - gave the public the sensation of being actually within the landscape itself. Another curious aspect is the choice of Rio de Janeiro as a motif for panoramic decoration, just as wallpaper was becoming popular as a substitute for tapestries in the second half of the 18th century.
The 19th century panoramic view is also seen in the search for a unified understanding of the different spheres of life towards which the artists of the 19th century directed their attention. The illustrated publications, generically known as picture albums, are concerned with a unified view. They are an inventory of nature and at the same time a study of society. Certain original drawings and watercolours byJean-Baptiste Debret shown here were intended for the album Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Bresil. The artist focuses on social relationships, treating the urban locations as scenes for social encounters. The selection of drawings for an illustrated album was intended to introduce new natural phenomena to the European public and to describe the ethnic, social and political characteristics of other peoples. The picture albums, published in engraved editions, were sold in sections to the European public. The Romantics exalted the idea of the peopk as nation, a difficult concept in a country like Brazil where slavery was still the norm.
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| Nicolas Antoine Taunay - Dawn in the Forest |
For the observers of Brazilian society who came from a generation affected by the basic changes in European society, nothing touched their romantic sense of conflict more profoundly than the issue of slavery. For those who were tired of the artificiality of European social mores, the Indian in direct contact with nature signified the recovery of a lost unity.
The picturesque view represents the primacy of pictorial values over the actual landscape as observed. The aesthetic criteria for this view taught that only certain combinations in nature were worthy of treatment by the artist. As part of the picturesque philosophy, garden recesses played a central aesthetic role and were one of the themes explored by English amateur artists. The gouache entitled Garden Scene on the Braganza Shore, dated 1827, is the work of William Havell. The work belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum and was probably done from sketches made by the artist when he passed through Rio de Janeiro on his way back from China with Lord Amherst's Mission in 1816. Havell came from a family of artists and is typical of the self-taught English painter of picturesque views.
The travelling artist who subscribed to the picturesque aesthetic was primarily one who enjoyed the spectacle of nature. He saw the pleasing in nature from the standpoint of his artistic training. It is a psychological rather than a dogmatic way of analysing aesthetic impressions. The artist's starting point is not beauty but the subjective faculty which allows him to feel and delight in the world.
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| Johann Moritz Rugendas Indian Shooting a Jaguar with Arrows |
The Brazilian coastline, especially that of Rio de Janeiro, stimulates a feeling for the picturesque, with its wild aspect and numerous and surprising changes of scenery.
It can well be imagined that the impressions aroused in these travelling artists by the Brazilian landscape reminded them of other traditions of painting, appealing to the poetic and Arcadian imagination and idealizing a harmonious paradise which they thought they had found in America. This idea is evident in Dawn in the Forest by Nicolas Antoine Taunay, who painted Arcadian scenes in the style of Poussin, in France, and endowed rural scenes with elements of Brazilian scenery. The concept of nature as pleasing and welcoming is responsible for the Arcadian view.
19th century landscape painting can translate physical experience, either through living in the exterior world with its sensations, or through interior recognition by means of the kinesthetic sensations which link the artist to the world.
The European interest in the natural world of America and their delight in adventurous travel made possible various ways of coming into contact with nature. The journeys in search of landscape sensations sought to achieve the heights and depths of the grand panoramic view. The living presence of the forces of nature aroused strong sensations of the grandeur of the universe, exciting a sense of the sublime, as expressed in the immense views of mountain heights, waterfalls, forests. Schute, a name still relatively unknown, creates a sense of precipitousness in Paulo Afonso Falls, a painting in the German Romantic mould.
Salvage of the stores and treasures of HMS Thetis at Cape Frio is a dramatic event shown in two canvasses painted by John Christian Schetky in 1833. The animation in the scene of the Rio de Janeiro shoreline, sometimes calm, sometimes wild, can produce an association between the state of the landscape and that of the individual soul.
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| Nicola Antonio Facchinetti - Sao Tome das Letras - 1876 |
The tangled dimension of the forest and the portrayal of virgin nature is associated with the deepest psychological states of man. In the pictorial conceptjon of tropical nature, derived from creation myths, the forest is seen as home and shelter. In the virgin forests painted by Clarac, "natural man" is shown as a rival to the giants in the forest depths.
The paintings of Clarac, Rugendas and Debret are an example of European "Indianism", which is essentially of a literary bent with plastic qualities added.
The romantic attitude does not possess its own definite figurative vocabulary. It can be characterized by its sharp break with classical convention, inside which the artist often moves. The new attitude in Europe at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century is one of subversion, of destabilization of classical culture and the values of European society. Only in opposition to those values and to classical culture does this new attitude take on a positive role in affirming the values of "primitive societies", in opposition to cities, the values of the simple country life, in opposition to contemporary society, the revival of the myth of primal unity, the communion of man with nature.
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| Joaquim Jose de Miranda The Expedition of Lt. Colonel Afonso Botelho de Sampaio e Souza into the Tibagi Backlands |
Finally, we must not forget the contribution of the travelling artists who stayed in Brazil for long periods or ended by settling in the country. It was due to uiem, particularly Felix Emile Taunay, Facchinetti and Grimm, that we saw the development of a new generation of Brazilian landscape painters.