Landscape and power: Taunay´s and Burford´s panoramas of Rio de Janeiro in Paris and London in the first half of the Nineteenth century

Abstract

There were only two panorama paintings of Rio de Janeiro exhibited in European rotundas in the first half of the Nineteenth Century. They were a view from the Bay of Guanabara displayed by Robert Burford in London´s Leicester Square rotunda in 1827 and a view from the top of the Carioca Hill, originally drawn by Félix-Émile Taunay in 1822 and exhibited in the Passage des Panoramas in Paris in 1824. The paper aims to understand the agenda behind the representations on the two sights. Because they both represented manners of dominance over the faraway city of Rio, I compare and analyze the different choices made by the artists as well as their marketing strategies, and the political and economic motivations behind each one.