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Picturing the Americas After Humboldt: The

Art of Women Travelers
Alicia Lubowski-Jahn
Published online: 30 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Alicia Lubowski-Jahn (2012) Picturing the Americas After Humboldt: The Art of Women
Travelers, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 45:1, 97-105, DOI: 10.1080/08905762.2012.670474

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 Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 84, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2012, 97105

Picturing the Americas After

Humboldt: The Art of Women
Travelers
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Alicia Lubowski-Jahn

Alicia Lubowski-Jahn began to build an expertise in landscape art through

her doctoral dissertation, ‘‘The Picture of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt
and the Tropical American Landscape,’’ which explores how the scientist’s
ecological view of nature found visual expression and aesthetic analogy in the
landscape genre. She has worked for various museums, including the
Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Frick Collection.

An examination of paintings, watercolors, and illustrations in the South

and Central American travel narratives of nineteenth-century women
travelers*including the German naturalist Princess Therese von Bayern
and the Victorian travelers Maria Graham, Adela Breton, and Marianne
North*reveals the influence of the Prussian scientist Alexander von
Humboldt (17691859). The scientist’s journey and his publication Vues
des Cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (181013;
Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the
Americas, forthcoming) codified an itinerary and functioned as a travel
guide comparable to the Grand Tour highlights, Baedeker’s guide, and
other travelogues. Those who followed in Humboldt’s footsteps made
note of it while those who deviated from his path signaled their
departures in their visual and written accounts. Humboldt’s commen-
taries and published illustrations of specific sites along his journey
informed not only women’s narrative modes in the Americas but also
their visual depictions of their travels.
Prior scholarship on Humboldt’s artistic legacy has focused chiefly on
the nineteenth-century European and North American male landscape
painters who traveled to South America after him, sometimes labeled the
Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas ISSN 0890-5762 print/ISSN 1743-0666 online Text # 2012 Americas Society, Inc.
http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905762.2012.670474
 98 Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas
1. It is worth noting that
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while the British-born
author and translator
Helen Maria Williams
(1761/21827) did not
travel to the Americas, her
English translations of
several of Humboldt’s
works (181829) represent
a pivotal aesthetic colla-
boration between the
scientist and a female
author engaged in transat-
lantic writings and events.
Jessica Damián, ‘‘Helen
Maria Williams’s Personal
Narrative of Travels from
Peru (1784) to Peruvian
Tales (1823),’’ Nineteenth-
Century Gender Studies 3:2
(Summer 2007): n. pag.
2. Walter Huber, Münchner
Naturforscher in
Südamerika (Munich: Dr.
Friedrich Pfeil, 1998), 14.
3. For Humboldt’s impact on
Therese von Bayern’s Bra-
zilian travelogue and other
German-language travel
accounts of Brazil, includ-
ing the writings of Ida
Pfeiffer (17971858) and
Ina von Binzer (188183),
see Cerue K. Diggs, ‘‘Brazil
after Humboldt*Triangu-
lar Perceptions and the
Colonial Gaze in
Nineteenth-Century
German Travel Narratives’’
(PhD diss., University of
Maryland, 2008), 201, 79,
85, 105, 1401.
‘‘school of Humboldt.’’ These artists were inspired by his aesthetics of
tropical nature and his American journey, and were often directly
acquainted with the naturalist. While female travelers also responded to
Humboldt’s authoritative journey, their imagery disregarded his aesthetic
precepts for landscape painters, which emphasized the representation of
vegetation above all other scientific data and esteemed the greatest vegetal
diversity as the measure of the highest aesthetic potential of nature,
therefore extolling compositional arrangements of diverse tropical plant
species (above all of the equatorial tropics). Instead, these women favored
an array of other subjects, including ethnography, geology, archaeology,
and botanical (individual plant) study.1
Praised as a female Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist and
ethnographer Princess Therese von Bayern (18501925) was compared to
the celebrated scientist by her contemporaries for the tremendous breadth
of her scientific investigations, painstaking empiricism, and far-flung
journeys, as well as for her German aristocratic origins, which allowed
both her and Humboldt to self-finance their global explorations.2 Von
Bayern published two South American travel narratives based on her 1888
expedition, as well as various zoological studies drawn from her travels
throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America. She brought
back to Munich numerous ethnological artifacts and natural history
specimens. Her precise descriptions of various Andean sites and plant
species in Reisestudien aus dem Westlichen Südamerika (1908; Travel
Studies from Western South America) are accompanied by Humboldt
citations. This indicates that she was aware of Humboldt’s travel itinerary
through the Andes mountain range, and researched one or more of his
popular writings on his New World expedition (17991804) as well as
several of his other volumes on America, which recorded the results of his
journey according to scientific specialties.3
Von Bayern’s ethnographic and anthropological photographs of
American indigenous societies form a visual repertoire completely absent
from the engravings in Humboldt’s American volumes*inclusive of
natural history illustrations, cartography, statistical graphs, and primarily
natural and archaeological landscapes in Views of the Cordilleras.
Environments, be they archaeological or wild natural settings, overpower
human beings in Humboldt’s work. People are represented by their
natural environments and their cultural productions*primarily archae-
ological artifacts and monuments*in a manner that detaches cultural
history from its people. Nevertheless, Von Bayern’s publications, like
Humboldt’s Views of the Cordilleras, mix imagery of tropical American
nature alongside those of its civilizations (albeit living societies rather
than those represented through archaeology). In addition to including her
own photography, Von Bayern published several landscape illustrations by
the Munich painter Rudolf Reschreiter (18681939), who accompanied

4. Hans Meyer, In den
Hoch-Anden von Ecuador:
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi etc.
Reisen und Studien, 2 vols.
(Berlin: D. Reimer, 1907).
5. Therese Prinzessin von
Bayern, Reisestudien Wes-
tlichen Südamerika, vol. 1
(Berlin: Dietrich Reimer
Ernst Vohsen, 1908), 161.
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6. Mary F. McVicker, Adela
Breton: A Victorian Artist
Amid Mexico’s Ruins
(Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press,
2005), 1, 5, 31.
Picturing the Americas After Humboldt 99
and illustrated the Andean expedition of Leipzig geographer Hans Meyer
(18581929).4
Von Bayern’s travel studies rely on Humboldt’s description of natural
habitats, including sites such as the highland Quindı́o Pass and Mount
Chimborazo as well as tropical rainforests and interior plains. The
publication included a photograph, ‘‘Waterfall of Tequendama,’’ described
by Von Bayern as the ‘‘famous’’ waterfall of Tequendama.5 The Waterfall of
Tequendama (plate VI) in Humboldt’s Views of the Cordilleras influenced
Von Bayern’s photograph as well as works by the American landscape
painter Frederic Edwin Church (18261900). Whereas Von Bayern’s
photograph emphasizes the powerful flow of the falling water, Church’s
compositions revel in the explosive impact of the water at the bottom of
the fall. Their images both convey the great volume of water and the high
elevation of the torrent’s descent, which captivated Humboldt at
Tequendama. Like the early archaeological and landscape photographs
of the Hungarian Pál Rosti (183074), taken on his two-year journey
through Cuba, Venezuela, and Mexico in 185758, Von Bayern’s
photographs also updated Humboldt’s earlier research and travel by
using the young medium of photography.
In contrast to the lure of Tequendama’s gushing cascade, Humboldt’s
primary focus on the small waterfall of Regla was on its mineralogical
composition and the distinctive prism geometry of the basalt formations.
Published in Views of the Cordilleras, Humboldt draws an express
association between the illustrations of the Basalt Rocks and The Cascade
[Waterfall] of Regla and Basalt Relief, Representing the Mexican Calendar
(plates XXII and XXIII): depicting a stone sculpture beside its natural
mineral deposit emphasizes that a cultural creation is a product of its
ecology. At Regla, the waterfall’s striking basaltic prisms attracted later
nineteenth-century European artist-travelers in Mexico (Fig. 1).
While best known for her paintings of archaeological ruins overgrown
with rainforest vegetation*in particular her color copies of the murals
and carvings of Maya architecture in the Yucatan peninsula*as well
as her collection of antiquities from western Mexico, Adela Breton
(18491923), like Humboldt, also recorded the region’s geological sites in
her sketchbooks and travels throughout Mexico between 1894 and 1908.
Comparable to Humboldt’s juxtaposition of ‘‘monuments’’ and ‘‘moun-
tains’’ in Views of the Cordilleras, Breton’s oeuvre evokes a parallel
consideration of a civilization and its cultural productions’ links to the
natural environment. Breton was familiar with geology through the
intellectual interests of her father, William Henry Breton (17991887), as
well as its popularity in her home city of Bath, England, which boasted the
local attractions of the limestone Mendip Hills and the Cheddar Gorge.6
In addition to the waterfall of Regla, Breton also depicted three
other dramatic geological formations that Humboldt reproduced: the
 100 Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas
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7. Adriana Méndez Rodenas,
‘‘Sensibilidad victoriana,
cuerpos mexicanos: el arte
de Adela Breton,’’ confer-
ence proceedings,
‘‘Encuentro: cuerpos y
sensibilidades.’’ La Bene-
mérita Universidad
Autónoma de Puebla and
El Colegio de Michoacán,
November 2728, 2001,
http://www.lpimen
tel.filos.unam.mx/sites/
default/files/poligrafias/4/
08-adriana-mendez.pdf,
213; my translation.
Fig. 1. Adela Breton, Waterfall of Regla, 1894. Watercolor on paper. # Bristol Museums, Galleries
& Archives.
snow-capped peak of Orizaba, the porphyritic rock at the summit of
Perote mountain, and the Jorullo volcano.
Humboldt’s influence can also be seen in other ways. The minute scale
of the travelers relative to an immense American nature is particularly
emphatic in Humboldt’s natural landscape views, a quality that Adriana
Méndez Rodenas also observes in Breton’s imagery: ‘‘The influence of
Humboldt is felt above all in the art of Breton in the perspective of the
traveler; specifically, in the position of his body before the monumentality
of the landscape, that conditions, at the same time, a gaze of
amazement.’’7 The natural bridges of Icononzo represented in Humboldt’s
Views of the Cordilleras (plate IV) became a popular destination, and
natural bridges a frequent landscape subject, in nineteenth-century
illustrated accounts. Following the visual motif of the geologic arch,
Breton depicted another example of Mexico’s natural bridges in a
watercolor drawn near San Andrés Chalchicomula of a natural stone
 Picturing the Americas After Humboldt 101

8. For Adriana Méndez Ro-
denas’s comparison of
Humboldt and Breton’s
images of a natural bridge,
see ‘‘Mapping the Un-
known: European Women
Travelers in Humboldt’s
New World,’’ conference
proceedings, ‘‘Alexander
von Humboldt: From the
Americas to the Cosmos,’’
CUNY Graduate Center,
New York, http://web.gc.
cuny.edu/dept/bildn/publi
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aqueduct (Fig. 2).8 Several geological sites are among the most ‘‘singular’’
images in Humboldt’s publication, displaying extraordinary natural
features, qualities that would have surely enticed Breton in her selection
of these geological landscapes.
The huge plant life of the tropics described by Humboldt was another
theme repeatedly taken up by nineteenth-century travelers. In Aspects of
Nature (Ansichten der Natur, 1808), which was not illustrated, he
particularly conveyed the extraordinary scale of the tropics.9 The British
female travelers Maria Graham (17861842) and Marianne North
(183090) both revisited one of the enormous tropical trees described by
Humboldt, the dragon tree of Orotava, Tenerife, illustrated and popularized

cations/documents/Men
dezRodenas15.pdf, 179
by Humboldt in Views of the Cordilleras (plate LXIX). Humboldt not only
stresses its enormous size, but also its great age: ‘‘older than the greater part
9. Alexander von Humboldt,
Aspects of Nature in Dif-
ferent Lands and Different
Climates; with Scientific
Elucidations, trans. Mrs.
Sabine, 2 vols. in 1
(London: Longman,
Brown, Green, and Long-
mans, 1850), 2:30.

Fig. 2. Adela Breton, Natural Bridge near San Andrés Chalchicomula, 1894. Watercolor on paper.
# Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.
 102 Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

10. Alexander von Humboldt, of the [American] monuments of which we have given a description in this
Researches Concerning the
Institutions and Monu- work.’’10 Humboldt’s scientific expedition remained in Tenerife for six days
ments of the Ancient In- en route to Cumaná, Venezuela, before traversing about six thousand miles
habitants of America. With and journeying through the Spanish American colonies (modern-day
Descriptions & Views of
Some of the Most Striking
Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, and Cuba) to observe South
Scenes in the Cordilleras, American nature of the ‘‘torrid zone.’’ Humboldt noted that although the
trans. Helen Maria giant tree in Orotava was well known to travelers, it had not been visually
Williams, 2 vols.
(London: Longman,
portrayed by anyone else. Graham, like Humboldt, published an image of
Hurst, Rees, Orme, and the tree together with American vistas in her 1824 Journal of a Voyage to
Brown, J. Murray, and Brazil and Residence There, during Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823. The
H. Colburn, 1814), 2:209.
caption accompanying an illustration of the great tree notes its transforma-
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tion since Humboldt described it in its full glory: ‘‘He saw it in all its
11. Maria Graham, Journal of greatness; I drew it after it had lost half its top.’’11 Graham’s composition of
a Voyage to Brazil and the tree also includes a hillside view of the peak of Tenerife in the far
Residence There, during
Part of the Years 1821, distance, a departure from the vantage of Humboldt’s representation (plate
1822, 1823 (London: LIV), which is the only illustration of a volcanic mountain in Views of the
Longman, Hurst, Rees, Cordilleras to focus on the geological contents of a volcano’s interior rather
Orme, Brown, and Green,
and J. Murray, 1824), 84 than its slope. Although Humboldt did not travel to Chile and Brazil,
85. Graham evokes scenes from Humboldt’s Views of the Cordilleras
in her illustrations of the Chilean cordilleras, while her interest in lush
tropical vegetation is also apparent in her Brazilian scenes. The famous tree
12. North observes: ‘‘The fa- fell victim to an 1867 hurricane,12 leaving Marianne North to paint other
mous dragon tree, which specimens during her visit to Tenerife in 1875. While North’s description of
Humboldt said was 4,000
years old, had tumbled the dragon tree in her Recollections of a Happy Life carefully records its
into a mere dust-heap, historical and commercial uses as a dye and resin, she was plainly drawn to
nothing but a few bits of its mammoth scale and chose to represent what she described as ‘‘the largest
bark remaining; but it
had some very fine suc- descendent of the famous tree’’ (Fig. 3).13
cessors about the island Humboldt’s descriptions of the great scale of tropical nature, the
. . .’’ Marianne North, quality of its skies and sunshine, and its characteristic locations and
Recollections of a Happy
Life: Being the Autobio-
beautiful vegetation (above all, the ‘‘noble’’ palm tree), entered an
graphy of Marianne enduring repertoire of tropical motifs and popular perceptions. Nancy
North, ed. Mrs. John Ad- Leys Stepan has positioned Humboldt as pivotal to our modern-day
dington Symonds, vol. 1
(London and New York:
constructions of the ‘‘tropical.’’ The large dimensions and attendant
Macmillan and Co., fertility of tropical plantlife is a recurring theme in North’s depictions of
1892), 194. American nature, whose scale is sometimes magnified by her composi-
13. North, 194.
tions’ close-up proximity to plants, and exemplified by Brazilian botanical
paintings that zoom in on flowers and their discrete parts (Fig. 4). Beyond
the specific species of the dragon tree, the iconographic legacy of
Humboldt’s image of a giant tree together with his textual descriptions
of the large scale of tropical nature can be seen in the broader context of
aesthetic interest in ‘‘singular’’ American nature and nineteenth-century
14. Nancy Leys Stepan, illustrations of a superabundant tropical nature.14
Picturing Tropical Nature While North traveled to almost thirty countries to paint plant species
(Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 2001), 21. in their native habitats, and expressed in her autobiography what Michelle
Payne describes as a ‘‘preference for rambling nature to formal gardens,
 Picturing the Americas After Humboldt 103
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Fig. 3. Marianne North, Dragon Tree at Orotava, Teneriffe, 1875. Oil on board. Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew. # RBG Kew.

lawns, and paths,’’15 her picture gallery, given to the Royal Botanical
15. Michelle Payne, Marianne Gardens at Kew in 1882, does not adhere to Humboldt’s aesthetic
North: A Very Intrepid preoccupation with wild nature’s free organization and character nor to
Painter (Kew: Kew Royal his directive that artists depict scientifically accurate botanical forms in a
Botanical Gardens,
2011), 15. landscape composition, thus defining the characteristic traits of distinct
landscape zones and ecological interrelations. Rather than defining a
habitat through depictions of a web of vegetation, North favors
compositions that zoom in on individual botanical species in environ-
ments (including insects, birds, other plants, or specific landscapes),
which lack taxonomic specificity by today’s standards of scientific
illustration.16
16. Stepan, 53. Instead of characterizing a fearful, sublime, or powerful wilderness
described by Humboldt and other male explorers, North did not hesitate
to depict views of gardens encountered on her travels and conveyed the
 104 Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas
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17. The large scale of tropical

nature also captivated
North during her 1871
meeting with the Agas-
sizes. She recounted in
her autobiography how:
Fig. 4. Marianne North, Flowers of Datura and Humming Birds, 1872/3. Oil on board. Royal
‘‘Mrs. Agassiz showed me
Botanic Gardens, Kew. # RBG Kew.
the great sheath of one of
the flowers, which native
mothers use as a cradle gentleness and familiarity of the American tropics, recounting in her
and also a baby’s bath, it
Recollections how Elizabeth Agassiz (18221907), American wife of the
being quite water-tight.
The flowers of the palms Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (180773), gave her assurances of the safety
were two to three yards of tromping through the Brazilian jungle: ‘‘She said, though she had
long.’’ North’s desire to
travel to the tropics was
wandered whole days in the forest, she had never seen a snake or a savage
further incited by a visit beast. One day she heard a great crashing through the tangle and felt
to Frederic Church’s stu- rather frightened, when a harmless milk-cow came out.’’17 This impulse to
dio, where she admired
an unfinished picture of
tame the landscape is also seen in North’s gallery of over eight hundred
Mount Chimborazo as paintings, inclusive of those plant and tree species native to territories
well as ‘‘other tropical under British colonial rule, which emphasized the might of the British
studies.’’ North, 48, 50,
68.
empire and the potential for the cultivation and acclimatization of exotic
18. Payne, 15. plants for British horticulture.18
The influence of Humboldt on the imagery of nineteenth-century
women travelers in Latin America further broadens our understanding of
the scope of his artistic legacy, in particular, the widespread iconographic
impact of the illustrated sites in Views of the Cordilleras. The specific
picturesque combination of ‘‘ruins’’ and ‘‘mountains’’ in his book, where
 Picturing the Americas After Humboldt 105

the artificial or built environment (ruins and artifacts) and the natural
world (vegetation and geomorphology) mix and mingle between and
within illustrations, resonated with Therese von Bayern and Adela
Breton’s own visual juxtapositions of American nature and its civiliza-
tions. On the other hand, Marianne North’s visual depictions of tropical
nature in native habitats, which omit all visual reference to the regions’
inhabitants, also participated in a colonial dialogue comparing the degree
of cultivation and development of tropical nature and civilization vis-à-
vis the European. Despite these continuities with Humboldt, the work of
these female artist-travelers also expanded Humboldt’s visual oeuvre.
Therese von Bayern, Maria Graham, and Marianne North all contributed
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to the study of Brazilian natural history while Adela Breton participated in

the exploration of the archaeology of Mayan civilization, two broad areas
19. Humboldt did unwit- of investigation uncharted by Humboldt.19
tingly publish a Maya
Codex. He presumed that
the Codex Dresdensis,
published as Fragment
d’un Manuscrit
hiéroglyphique mexicain
conservé à la Bibliothèque
royale de Dresde (Frag-
ment of a Mexican hier-
oglyphic manuscript,
preserved in the royal
library at Dresden) (plate
XLV in Views of the
Cordilleras), was an Aztec
pictorial manuscript.