Brazil through French eyes: a nineteenth-century artist in the tropics

Abstract

With Brazil Through French Eyes: A Nineteenth Century Artist in the Tropics Ana Lúcia Araújo (Howard University, Washington, dc, us) makes a major contribution to a field that remains largely underexplored: the accounts produced by foreign travelers in Brazil throughout the imperial period (1822-1889). Araújo's book focuses on the expedition taken by the French painter François-Auguste Biard (1799-1882) to Brazil in 1858-1859, providing the reader with a meticulous and well informed analysis of the resulting travelogue, Deux années au Brésil, published in Paris in 1862 and accompanied by a large number of engravings. The neglect of this primary source by most scholars in Brazil and abroad can be explained by the problems associated with the satirical approach favored by the author. The account is generally dismissed as a caricature, which seems to echo the reaction of the first Brazilian readers, who devalued Biard's book on the basis on the obvious prejudice and plain stereotypes used in catering to a very large audience. This is a revised and expanded version of a book first published in French under the title Romantisme tropical: l'aventure illustrée d'un peintre français au Brésil (Presses de l'Université Laval, 2009). Ana Lúcia Araújo, whose previous works dealt with issues of memory, slavery, and the South Atlantic, 1 proposes to compare the travelogue and the woodcuts with other illustrations and 19th-century European travel writings, and to show that it is actually part of a long tradition in the genre. Her argument rests heavily on the concept of "tropical romanticism", a specific mode of constructing visual and written narratives about Brazil that dialogues with other paradigms of construction of an exotic reality thorough such as Orientalism (and, one could add, Indianism), aiming at building a markedly hierarchized depiction of the local society. One of the main themes of Araújo's book is Biard's stance in the face of slavery. Araújo tests several hypotheses throughout her book, exploring the nuance in the painter's behavior, and how his attitude toward the practice of slavery tends to change throughout his period in Brazil. If, in the early stages of his biography, one might feel tempted to label him an abolitionist, in the end Araújo manages to persuade us of the 1