Johann Moritz Rugendas

Johann Moritz Rugendas (29 March 1802 – 29 May 1858) was a German painter, famous in the first half of the 19th century for his works depicting landscapes and ethnographic subjects in several countries in the Americas.

In March 1822, they reached Brazil to Rio in the company of scientists Édouard Ménétries (1802-1861), Ludwig Riedel (1761-1861), Christian Hasse and Nester Rubtsov [pt] (1799-1874).

As illustrator, Rugendas visited the Serra da Mantiqueira and the historical towns of Barbacena, São João del Rei, Mariana, Ouro Preto, Caeté, Sabará and Santa Luzia.

But Rugendas continued to live on his own in Brazil until 1825, exploring and recording his many impressions of daily life in the provinces of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro.

[4] On his return to Europe between 1825 and 1828, Rugendas lived successively in Paris, Augsburg and Munich, with the aim of learning new art techniques, such as oil painting.

Inspired by explorer and naturalist, Alexander Humboldt (1769–1859), Rugendas sought financial support for a much more ambitious project of recording pictorially the life and nature of Latin America.

[citation needed] From 1834 to 1844 he travelled to Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and Bolivia, and finally returned in 1845 to Rio de Janeiro.

This movement challenged the dichotomy between nature and civilization and considered places such as colonial Brazil to be a harmonious environment of racial mixing.

Although Rugendas defended gradual emancipation, the artist also believed that Brazilian slavery represented a new, positive life for Africans, who got the chance to learn the Christian experience.

[12] In some images, for example the Enterro de um Negro na Bahia, Rugendas identified the dead body of a "black man with another corpse: the suffering Christ the ‘Savior’ honored by the city's name.

Petrônio Domingues says that the artistic work of foreigner painters and ethnographers in nineteenth-century Brazil had a strong influence on the development of the racial imaginary.

He published a book with his travel log and a collection of one hundred pictures; it was called Viagem Pitoresca através do Brazil, in Portuguese; Voyage Pittoresque dans le Brésil, in French; and Malerische Reise in Brasilien, in German.