The Quest for a Tropical Paradise: Palm Tree as Fact and Symbol in Latin American Landscape Imagery, 1850–1875

Abstract

Heart of the Andes (Fig. 1), completed and exhibited by Frederic Church in 1859, became the touchstone of the North American pictorial consciousness of Spanish America in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. On a five-by-ten-foot canvas Church painted the great peaks of the Andes looming above a foreground of rich, dense vegetation, crashing waterfalls, and penitent natives by a roadside shrine. The picture carried the authority of the artist's extensive South American expeditions of 1853 and 1857, during which he had sketched the varied scenery of Colombia and Ecuador. Viewers delighted in the details of mountains and vegetation he had transferred to canvas. Beyond the reportage of geological and botanical facts, however, the painting was celebrated by the public because it gave visual form to their ideal of tropical America: it represented the long-lost Garden of Eden, a nascent world left untouched since the Creation.