Atlantic-Pacific Travel and Travel Narrative in the Aesthetic of Augustus Earle

RICARDO CICERCHIA

North Carolina

Conferencia; Lecture Series. East Carolina University; 2005

East Carolina University

Paintings of Augustus Earle were documentary in nature. And at that time there was a voracious market for this kind of work. He modified the scenery according to picturesque conventions, so that his views of the country would appeal to the taste of his public at home in England. But is also true that the magnificent spectacles appreciated by a particularly sensitive man impacted very much on the dimension of his work. The New Zealand chapter, characterised by his admiration for Maori communities and sometimes idealised view of life in pre-colonial Pacific was determined by his growing experience and relatively solid position as an artist and less by his exaggerated sympathy for New Zealanders. (One could note too that Earle showed little stylistic development in the eight or nine years which separate the Brazilian watercolours from those painted in the South Pacific) And finally, he almost ignored the social conflicts produced by colonialist impact. Perhaps his political discourse, in the context of a Europe Latin America Pacific, itinerary that was not rare, but only broken around the last two decades of the nineteenth century, with the hegemony of capitalism was just in response to the reinvigorated noble savage European imaginary.