From An Episode in the Life of a Traveling Painter

Western art can boast few documentary painters of true distinction. Of those whose lives and work we know in detail, the finest was Rugendas, who made two visits to Argentina. The second, in 1847, gave him an opportunity to record the landscapes and physical types of the Río de la Plata—in such abundance that an estimated 200 paintings remained in the hands of local collectors—and to refute his friend and admirer Humboldt, or rather a simplistic interpretation of Humboldt's theory, according to which the painter's talent should have been exercised solely in the more topographically and botanically exuberant regions of the New World. But the refutation had in fact been foreshadowed ten years earlier, during Rugendas's brief and dramatic first visit, which was cut short by a strange episode that would mark a turning point in his life.

Johan Moritz Rugendas was born in the imperial city of Augsburg on the 29th of March 1802. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all well-known genre painters; one of his ancestors, Georg Philip Rugendas, was famous for his battle scenes. The Rugendas family (although Flemish in origin) had emigrated from Catalonia in 1608 and settled in Augsburg, hoping to find a social environment more hospitable to its Protestant faith. The first German Rugendas was a master clockmaker; all the rest were painters. Johan Moritz confirmed his vocation at the age of four. A gifted draftsman, he was an outstanding student at the studio of Albrecht Adam and then at the Munich Art Academy. When he was nineteen, an opportunity arose to join the expedition to America led by Baron Langsdorff and financed by the czar of Russia. His mission was one that, a hundred years later, would have fallen to a photographer: to keep a graphic record of all the discoveries they would make and the landscapes through which they would pass.

At this point, to get a clearer idea of the work upon which the young artist was embarking, it is necessary to go back in time. It was Johan Moritz's great-grandfather, Georg Philip Rugendas (1666–1742) who founded the dynasty of painters. And he did so as a result of losing his right hand as a young man. The mutilation rendered him unfit for the family trade of clockmaking, in which he had been trained since childhood. He had to learn to use his left hand, and to manipulate pencil and brush. He specialized in the depiction of battles, with excellent results, due to the preternatural precision of his draftsmanship, which was due in turn to his training as a clockmaker and the use of his left hand, which, not being his spontaneous choice, obliged him to work with methodical deliberation. An exquisite contrast between the petrified intricacy of the form and the violent turmoil of the subject matter made him unique. His protector and principal patron was Charles XII of Sweden, the warrior king, whose battles he painted, following the armies from the hyperborean snows to sun-scorched Turkey. In later years he became a prosperous printer and publisher of engravings—a natural extension of his skills in military documentation. His three sons, Georg Philip, Johan, and Jeremy, inherited both the business and the skills. Christian (1775–1826), the son of Georg Philip Junior, was the father of our Rugendas, who brought the cycle to a close by painting the battles of another warrior king, Napoleon.

Napoleon's fall ushered in a "century of peace" in Europe, so inevitably the branch of the profession in which the family had specialized went into decline. Young Johan Moritz, an adolescent at the time of Waterloo, was obliged to execute a swift change of direction. Initially apprenticed to Adam, a battle painter, he began taking classes in nature painting at the Munich Academy. The "nature" favored by buyers of paintings and prints was exotic and remote, so he would have to follow his artistic calling abroad, and the direction his travels would take was soon determined by the opportunity to...