The Garden of Eden Revisited

Abstract

This article examines the view of South America as the Garden of Eden through the lens of three German romantic artists: Johann Moritz Rugendas, Otto Grashof and Carl Alexander Simon. I discuss some of their paintings and drawings of the jungles of Brazil and the forests of Chile, along with notes and entries from their travelogues, to determine the extent to which specific elements from the German Weltanschauung, together with a colonialist gaze, drove their depiction of South America. The general argument is that linkages between South America and paradise raised by German artists throughout the nineteenth century would not have meant a glorification of South American nature, as is usually maintained. On the contrary, they should be read as the conjunction of factors such as racial assumptions prompted by new scientific disciplines, a sense of cultural superiority, and an intense obsession with both the past and an idea of purity projected onto distant lands. This, in turn, would have been part of a series of appropriative discourses concerning regions beyond Europe, put into practice by German romantic explorers of the time. In this fashion, this essay proposes a reoriented interpretation of these artists and their work, challenging the prevalent idea that the development of romantic landscape painting in South America was almost entirely determined by European aesthetic trends such as the sublime and the picturesque.