INTRODUCTION
cal analysis shows the difference between Gros' faultless academic style and Velasco's "learned constructions" with their "historical, philosophic, and folkloric overtones," to use terms employed by the Mexican critic Justino Fernandez.12 And it was an Englishman, Daniel T. Egerton, who was responsible for dramatic views of Popocatepetl. The German Johann Mauritz Rugendas (1802-1858), and later the Englishman Thomas S. Somerscales (1842-1927), devoted long hours to views of the Bay of Valparaiso, and had no equal in evoking the wild, cold South Pacific. The Frenchman Raymond Monvoisin (1790-1870) arrived in Chile in 1843. The Academy of Painting, founded in 1848, was headed first by the Italian Alessandro Cicarelli (1810-1874); he was succeeded as director by the German Ernst Kirchbach (1832-1880). They and Anthony Smith (1832-1877), the tireless observer of the Cordillera, were the first Chilean painters. By the middle of the nineteenth century foreigners were active in all parts of Latin America. Trained in the academic manner and adhering to all the established rules, they painted with great technical proficiency, and with increasing emphasis on landscape, as the Cuban critic Adelaide de Juan has observed.13 Since many of these painters were teachers, and since almost all the schools of fine arts were of their creation, one might conclude that it was they who taught painting and sculpture to every Latin American artist active at the end of the century. The conclusion is too simplistic, however. In the period between 1870 and 1920—when one can identify about 500 artists of some degree of interest—there was constant movement back and forth between Europe and Latin America. The foreign academics and landscapists established in Latin America practiced and taught different genres of painting. During the second half of the century, the two most in demand were historical paintings and portraits. Newly established national institutions sought enhancement in tableaux of heroes engaged in bold deeds. For their part, members of the moneyed classes that began to assert themselves following the wars of independence took pleasure in their own likenesses and in pictures devoted to mythological or biblical subjects, possession of which was supposed to convey a certain social standing. While landscape constitutes the outstanding feature of the scenes of the Paraguayan War painted by Candido Lopez (Argentine, 1840-1902), in itself it was of no interest to either of the patrons mentioned above. With very few exceptions, such as the previously mentioned Jose Maria Velasco, landscape did not come into its own until the twentieth century, when it had an extraordinary flowering, concentrated, however, in a few favorite areas—notably Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. In 1978 the State Art Museum of Sao Paulo presented an exhibit of 54 landscape artists active in the first two decades of the present century. Two points are to be noted in regard to this flowering of landscape. First there were a large number of paintings in which landscape served merely as a backdrop—scenes of women washing clothes in streams, laborers working in the fields, and so on—all rather neutral from the descriptive viewpoint. There is no great difference between the washerwomen Andres de Santa Maria painted in
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