Revision date: NOV 13, 2004
Augustus Earle was born in England in 1793, in an American art-oriented family. A gifted boy, he first exhibited at age 13. Soon after the completion of his formal training, he set out to travel, first in the Mediterranean, then in the United States of America, and then, at 27, to South America. After a brief stay in Peru, he disembarked in January 1821 in Rio de Janeiro. He stayed in Brazil until February 1824. During these three years he remained an independent artist. He gave a few of his watercolours to Maria Graham, who made use of them in her Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence there during the years 1821, 1822, 1823, London:1824. Otherwise Earle’s work, mainly watercolours, was not published. The National Library of Australia hold and show on their website a set of these; that is the land that Earle visited after Brazil. The rest is dispersed.
More about it
See this picture and more by Augustus Earle, in the picture search pages of the Nacional Library of Australia www.nla.gov.au/catalogue/pictures/, item id. earle650.jpg; also in the University of Virginia USA, Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas picture database project, http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/search.html, item id. IMG03.
Comparative:
- Géricault’s Boxers, drawn from English boxing engravings.
- Rugendas’ Voyage Pittoresque au Brésil, on the same subject and in the same years.
In England as well as in Germany, a philosophic trend expressed as early as in the 18th century the opinion that the real identity of the people is not defined by the educated class’ manners, which are always cosmopolitan, but in the simple ways of the common folk.
Boxing and boxing engraving were popular in Britain in young Earle’s time; this leads us to suspect that he might have observed better the detail of the action on the glimpse than Rugendas, who as far as we know had not been exposed to any pugilistic culture in Augsburg or München, could. See for example the relaxed hands of the fighters: relaxed hands.