Johann Moritz Rugendas

White European artists began to depict the flora, fauna, and inhabitants of Brazil beginning in the mid-seventeenth century when the Dutch established a colony in the northeast of the country. Thus began an artistic tradition that reached a new degree of comprehensiveness in the work of Johann Moritz Rugendas. The German artist traveled to Brazil and joined an expedition headed by Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, the consul-general of the Russian Empire in Brazil. Langsdorff's group arrived in 1822 and explored the country from his farm north of Rio de Janeiro. Rugendas, the team's illustrator, did not continue with the expedition when it departed for a journey along the Amazon. Returning to Europe, he published the Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil (Picturesque Voyage in Brazil) simultaneously in French and German in twenty installments between 1827 and 1835. The volumes contained over 300 lithographic illustrations based on Rugendas's drawings and watercolors.
An ardent abolitionist, Rugendas believed he was taking a scientific, ethnographic approach in his drawings documenting Black people in Brazil. His figures are often generic types, with those performing tasks in Western dress more sympathetically depicted than Black and indigenous peoples who had not adopted European ways. Here, he chose to show a man and woman on a plantation pausing from their labor under a tree, a placid, romanticized scene that does not represent the harsher realities of enslaved farm workers. Ultimately the images Rugendas created of the enslaved and indigenous experience in Brazil are shaped by his own notions concerning race and civilization and reflect as much about the artist as those he sought to depict.
Rugendas's drawings for the lithographic plates, which were largely executed by French printmakers, are rare. Correspondence indicates that many were in the possession of the publishing house, which sold them after the 1835 publication was issued. The plate after the present drawing appears in the 2e Division, 6 livraison, published in 1827, which was devoted to Costumes et Portraits des Negres et des Indiens.
For a copy of Rugendas's volume see PML 76302, Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil par Maurice Rugendas. Tr. de l'allemand par Mr. de Golbéry ..., Paris : Engelmann & cie, 1835.