Herrmann Rudolf Wendroth

Herrmann Rudolf Wendroth was a German mercenary and amateur artist who went to Brazil in 1851 and left important visual documentation about the province of Rio Grande do Sul.

In 1963, his secretary Guilherme Auler, while working on documentation related to Princess Isabel, found Buhlmann's letter and the album and notified Augusto Meyer, who was delighted with the material and called a commission to study it and arrange for its publication.

In this process, it was verified, with the help of the Criminalistics Institute of Rio de Janeiro, that Wendroth's signature had been erased and Buhlmann placed his on top, thus establishing the true authorship of the images.

In 1971, in an article in Revista Brasileira de Cultura, Hélio Vianna stated that Prince D. Pedro Gastão had lent the collection to Jaime Bastian Pinto to organize the publication, which also did not materialize.

Finally, in 1982 the Riocell company made a partial publication with a presentation by Abeillard Barreto, produced as a year-end gift to its employees,[1] and the following year the state government published the complete collection in the album O Rio Grande do Sul em 1852: aquarelas por Herrmann Rudolf Wendroth.

[7] In 2020, an issue was published by the University of Lisbon's Center for Lusophone Literatures and Cultures in cooperation with the Rio-Grandense Library, with a text by Francisco das Neves Alves and Luiz Henrique Torres.

In many images, the author becomes the protagonist of the scenes, illustrating the situations he went through, such as the time in jail, the hunting, the drinking, the incursions into the bush, a discussion with a priest, the activity as a prospector, the amorous gallantries.

[...] Inserted in the context of nineteenth-century travels, he, like the other men who crossed the Atlantic in search of new species and stories, also behaved as a documentary artist because, like some of his contemporaries, he was a meticulous analyst and observer of particularities of the world."