Nicolas Antoine Taunay (Paris, França 1755 - idem 1830)
Painter, illustrator, teacher.
He begins studying painting in 1768 in Paris, in the studios of François Bernard Lépicié, Nicolas Guy Brenet and Francesco Casanova. At 17, he devotes himself to landscape painting. From 1777 onwards he exhibits at the event known as the Jeunesse and at the Salon de la Correspondance, both unofficial. In 1784 he is accepted as an associate (agréé) of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. This title allows him to take part in official events and secures his nomination for a three-year stay at the Academy in the Palazzo Mancini in Rome. In Italy he comes into contact with the painter Jacques-Louis David (1748 - 1825), who is then painting The Oath of the Horatii. He returns to France in 1787 and exhibits at the Paris Salons. In 1793, amid the turmoil and the abolition of the monarchical institutions that followed the French Revolution, he leaves Paris, returning in 1796 to join the newly created Institut de France. In 1805 he depicts Napoleon's (1769 - 1821) campaigns in Germany. With the end of the Napoleonic empire, he comes to Brazil as a member of the French Artistic Mission. He arrives in Rio de Janeiro in 1816 and becomes a pensioner of Dom João VI (1767 - 1826) and a member of the Escola Real de Ciências, Artes e Ofícios, later the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes - Aiba, where he holds the chair of landscape painting. In 1821, after disagreements arising from the appointment of Henrique José da Silva (1772 - 1834) as director of the School, he returns to France.
Critical Commentary
Despite the French painter Nicolas Taunay's short stay in Brazil (1816-1821), his production of paintings with Brazilian subjects1 is of great importance for the country's art history in the 19th century, especially regarding the development of landscape painting in Brazil. When he arrives in Rio de Janeiro in 1816 as a member of the French Artistic Mission - led by Joachim Lebreton (1760 - 1819), whose aim is to create the first art academy in the country - Taunay, aged 61, is already an artist of long experience and renown in France.
The son of Pierre Antoine Henri Taunay, a painter at the Royal Sèvres Manufactory, he enters François Lépicié's studio at the age of 13. He later studies history painting with Nicolas Brenet and battle painting with Francesco Casanova. In the latter master's absence, he devotes himself to the direct study of nature, painting the outskirts of Paris or making study trips to neighboring countries. In 1777 he begins his career as an artist, taking part in unofficial exhibitions such as the so-called Jeunesse or the Salon de la Correspondance. His work begins to be noticed and, in 1784, he is made an associate of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture with the work Orlando Furioso, which allows him to take part in the official Salons. That year he leaves for Rome, where he stays until 1787 as a pensioner at the Palazzo Mancini, seat of the French Academy in Italy. In Rome he comes into contact with the painter Jacques-Louis David (1748 - 1825), who is then painting The Oath of the Horatii. He paints pictures inspired by the Italian landscape and its glorious past. He returns to Paris and, even during the fall of the monarchy and the Revolution, continues to practice genre, history and landscape painting and to take part in the Salons. During the Terror he takes refuge with his wife and children in Montmorency, in the house that had belonged to the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778), whom he had known personally and admired all his life. In 1795 he is appointed a member of the Institut de France. In 1798 the painting Exterior of a Military Hospital (1798), on Napoleon Bonaparte's victorious Italian campaign, is acquired by the government for the Musée du Louvre. Reintegrated under the new regime, Nicolas Taunay becomes one of the future emperor's favorite painters. During the Napoleonic empire he produces decorations for the imperial residence and, above all, history and battle paintings depicting the deeds of Napoleon I and his army, and is invited to accompany the German campaign as a painter. The historical reversals that follow Napoleon's fall put Taunay in danger again. At this point he is invited to join Lebreton's group.2
In Rio de Janeiro, Taunay is engaged as a pensioned painter of the kingdom and professor of landscape painting at the Escola Real de Ciências, Artes e Ofícios, later the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes - Aiba. While the school has not yet been effectively established, he paints portraits of the heirs to the throne at the queen's request, as well as landscapes of Rio de Janeiro. Largo da Carioca and Morro de Santo Antônio are, by all indications, the first paintings with Brazilian subjects made by the artist, in 1816. We can see that the novelty of the Rio landscape enchants the artist, yet his solid training does not allow him to abandon the classical canons of representation. He strives to be faithful to the new landscape, but guided by his pictorial repertoire. Ordered landscapes appear, in which man is in contemplative harmony with nature. The almost constant presence of oxen in his canvases evokes the pastoral landscape and the idyllic vision of Arcadian nature.
On the other hand, atmospheric light gives the characteristic landscapes of Rio de Janeiro (Pão de Açúcar, Outeiro da Glória, Floresta da Tijuca, etc.) a mysterious aura. Taunay does not surrender to the piercing brightness of the tropics. In the emblematic painting Cascatinha da Tijuca, the artist depicts himself at sunrise practicing his craft.3 Small before a monumental but tamed nature, he has in front of his easel a banana tree, the symbol of the new nature he must confront. But there is no conflict; the contemplative vision prevails. Even in genre paintings such as Dom João VI e D. Carlota Joaquina Passeando na Quinta da Boa Vista [Dom João VI and Dona Carlota Joaquina Strolling at the Quinta da Boa Vista], in which he depicts the royal family, the placid natural landscape prevails over the narrated scene. As the artist and historian Carlos Zilio has noted, his meticulous, orderly works reveal the difficulty of reconciling European culture with an unfamiliar nature. In trying to come to terms with this new nature, Taunay at times submits it to European schemes of representation.
Given the direction taken by the Escola Real de Ciências, Artes e Ofícios, Nicolas Taunay decides to return to France in 1821, recommending his son Félix Taunay (1795 - 1881) to replace him in the landscape painting classes. Another of his sons, the draftsman Adrien Taunay (1803 - 1828), remains in Brazil and dies in an accident while serving as draftsman of the Langsdorff Expedition. In France, he returns to historical subjects and to his successful career, dying in 1830.4
Notes
1 The French artist is presumed to have produced 25 to 40 canvases with Brazilian subjects. However, only 16 have been identified so far.
2 There are two accounts of this: first, that Taunay himself offered his services as court painter and tutor to Dom João VI, already settled in Rio de Janeiro, in an 1816 letter. Since the offer matched the king's wish to establish an Academy in the new capital of the kingdom, the artist naturally joined Lebreton's Mission. Second, that Lebreton himself, also persecuted by the new regime, directly invited Taunay.
3 It is worth recalling that Taunay bought land in the Floresta da Tijuca and built a house near the Cascatinha, in memory of his retreat in Montmorency and evoking Rousseau's ideal of a natural life.
4 Nicolas Taunay's fame at the time can be gauged from the painting Charles X Distribuant des Récompenses aux Artistes, à la Fin du Salon de 1824 [Charles X Distributing Awards to the Artists at the End of the 1824 Salon], by François-Joseph Heim (1797-1865), painted between 1825 and 1827 and held by the Musée du Louvre in Paris. In it, Taunay appears alongside Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), among others.
Critiques
"His pictures are generally luminous without the distribution of light harming the whole. In them one sees no great effects of shadow; contemplating Brazilian nature changed his coloring and inspired one of the best phases of his career as a landscape painter, for indeed some of his views of Rio de Janeiro have an incomparable realism.
He sought to capture the effects of tropical light, so difficult to render, and often managed to solve this arduous problem".
Afonso d'Escragnolle Taunay
TAUNAY, Affonso de E. A Missão Artística de 1816. Brasília: Universidade de Brasília, 1983, p. 195-197
"(...) The prestige of Louis David was growing and with it the dominance of Neoclassicism. Nicolas Antoine Taunay was reluctant to follow the new tendency blindly, but he could not avoid paying it some attention so as not to displease the devotees of David's dominant painting. Although interested in landscape, he also had to apply himself to the figure, for Neoclassical aesthetics considered landscape an inferior genre and extolled only figure composition, 'major' painting, and particularly that devoted to subjects from Antiquity, for which the models were invariably Greco-Roman sculpture. As a competitor at the Salon, Taunay won major official prizes".
Quirino Campofiorito
CAMPOFIORITO, Quirino. História da pintura brasileira no século XIX. Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 1983, p. 54.
"Taunay is not interested in representing the landscape, but in interpreting it through effects of luminous contrast. It should be noted that the coastal landscape of Rio often met the expectations of the traveling artists, the sea outlined within the limits of the bay offering an image of lake-like placidity that allows serene contemplation and associates it with the spirit of Arcadian poetry. They rarely relate to the storm of the untamed sea.
But Taunay's Arcadian vein felt more at home in the retreat of the Floresta da Tijuca, where he lives with his family, recalling once again Rousseau's fate. He treats the woods of Tijuca as his private garden and revives the memory of pastoral painting. In the contemplative vision of day and dusk, light is the poetic element that bridges life and painting".
Ana Maria de Moraes Belluzzo
BELLUZZO, Ana Maria de Moraes. O Brasil dos viajantes. São Paulo: Metalivros, 1994. v. 3, p. 123-124
"Nicolas Antoine Taunay's role as a landscape painter was different, but no less important for the construction of Brazil's image. (...) Besides emphasizing the characteristic features of the Brazilian setting - the presence of Black slaves and friars, the peculiar architecture of the Portuguese casa-grande - Taunay also gave a new and shrewd meaning to the tradition of pastoral landscape inspired by Claude Lorrain. The leisure moments of the Portuguese Court's life in the tropics were assimilated to the idyll, to rustic reverie, with only a light touch of local color, that of the buildings and vegetation. Taunay's stay in Brazil lasted only six years, but his presence had fruitful consequences for Brazilian art. With his five sons - Charles, Félix Émile, Hippolyte, Théodore and Aimé-Adrien - four of whom remained in Brazil after their father's departure, he transferred to the Floresta da Tijuca the memory of his house in Montmorency, Mont Louis, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau had lived, whom the painter had known personally.
The landscape that shows him near the Cascatinha da Tijuca, now in the Museu Histórico da Cidade do Rio, is an almost moving testimony of his dialogue with the majesty of nature. Tiny, immersed in the majestic landscape, the artist almost takes on the air of a hero, absorbed as he is in depicting a palm tree with the humble tools of his craft. Beside him, two slaves admire the work; others, further down, lead a donkey. One could hardly express better the value of learning through observation, or the emotion before the voice of nature. This will be the inspiration for his son Félix-Émile in developing his own version of the Brazilian landscape.
But one must not forget that Taunay also painted urban landscapes that can almost be considered parts of a panorama. The two views from the Morro de Santo Antônio, in the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes (MNBA), present two framings of the city endowed with the objectivity of the camera lucida. The friars, the figures in the foreground, heighten the image's sense of reality, adding local color: that blend of urban and rural, of Baroque religiosity and modernity that must still have been visible in colonial Rio de Janeiro".
Luciano Migliaccio
MIGLIACCIO, Luciano. O século XIX. In: MOSTRA DO REDESCOBRIMENTO, 2000, SÃO PAULO. Arte do século XIX. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo: Associação Brasil 500 anos Artes Visuais, 2000. p. 52-53.
"Taunay's vision is one of the most interesting among the many traveling painters who passed through our country. His pictures impress not only through the quality of their execution and refined technique, but also by showing the long experience of his craft, which allowed the artist to produce a result that could be called 'mature surprise' when his solid training met the discovery of the new landscape and the unexpected subjects that Brazilian nature imposed on him. It is fascinating to see him still trying to adapt to the new landscape of Rio de Janeiro the classical compositions he used to repeat in Europe, with details worthy of a miniaturist, and even including more cows and herds in the Brazilian landscape than any other foreign artist before or after him. (...) Even so, the absolute precision in describing vegetation and architecture shows the effort of the old artist who also seeks to be faithful to the new landscape, even while overlaying it with classical patterns".
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
LAGO, Pedro Corrêa do. Taunay e seu tempo. In: MOSTRA DO REDESCOBRIMENTO, 2000, SÃO PAULO. O Olhar distante. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo: Associação Brasil 500 anos Artes Visuais, 2000. p. 115.
Group Exhibitions
1777 - Paris (France) - Jeunesse Exhibition, at Praça Dauphine
1778 - Paris (France) - Jeunesse Exhibition, at Praça Dauphine
1782 - Paris (France) - Salon de la Correspondance
1787 - Paris (France) - Paris Salon
1789 - Paris (France) - Paris Salon
1791 - Paris (France) - Paris Salon
1793 - Paris (France) - General Commune of the Arts
1796 - Paris (France) - Paris Salon
1798 - Paris (France) - Paris Salon
1802 - Paris (France) - Exhibition, at Museu Central de Arte em Paris
1804 - Paris (France) - Paris Salon - large gold medal
1806 - Paris (France) - Paris Biennial
1808 - Paris (France) - Paris Salon
1808 - Paris (France) - Salon de la Correspondance
1822 - Paris (France) - Paris Salon
Posthumous Exhibitions
1953 - São Paulo SP - 2nd Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, Pavilhão dos Estados
1976 - Washington D.C. (United States) - European View of America, National Gallery of Art
1977 - Paris (France) - European View of America, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais
1977 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Aspects of the Brazilian Landscape: 1816-1916, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes
1980 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Nicolas Antoine Taunay: 1755-1830, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes
1984 - São Paulo SP - Tradition and Rupture: A Synthesis of Brazilian Art and Culture, Fundação Bienal
1989 - Paris (France) - La Révolution Française et l'Europe, Grand Palais
1989 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Rio de Janeiro: From Machado de Assis to the Great Painters, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
1990 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - French Artistic Mission and Traveling Painters: France - Brazil in the 19th Century, Fundação Casa França-Brasil
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Nature: Four Centuries of Art in Brazil, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
1992 - Zurich (Switzerland) - Brasilien: Entdeckung und Selbstentdeckung, Kunsthaus Zürich
1993 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazilian Landscapes by Foreign Artists, Galeria de Arte Sesc Tijuca
1994 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - The Traveling Painters, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes
1994 - São Paulo SP - Brazil of the Travelers, Museu de Arte de São Paulo
1995 - Lisbon (Portugal) - Brazil of the Travelers, Centro Cultural de Belém
1996 - London (England) - Brazil Through European Eyes, Christie's
1997 - Mexico City (Mexico) - Así Está la Cosa: instalación y arte objeto en America Latina, Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo
1998 - São Paulo SP - The Picturesque Landscape in Brazil, Museu da Chácara do Céu
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazil Rediscovered, Paço Imperial
2000 - Porto Alegre RS - From Frans Post to Eliseu Visconti: Museu Nacional de Belas Artes - RJ Collection, Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul Ado Malagoli
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - The Carioca Landscape, Museu de Arte Moderna
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Views of Rio in the Geyer Collection, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brazil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition. The Distant Gaze and 19th-Century Art, Fundação Bienal
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brasiliana Collection, Pinacoteca do Estado
2001 - São Paulo SP - Trajectory of Light in Brazilian Art, Itaú Cultural
2002 - São Paulo SP - Image and Identity: A Look at History in the Museu de Belas Artes Collection, Instituto Cultural Banco Santos
2004 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - The French Artistic Mission and the Origins of the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes Collection, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes
2005 - Fortaleza CE - Brazilian Art: In the Public and Private Collections of Ceará, Espaço Cultural Unifor
2007 - São Paulo SP - French Artistic Mission: Museu Nacional de Belas Artes Collection, Pinacoteca do Estado
2008 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Nicolas Antoine Taunay in Brazil: A Reading of the Tropics, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes
2008 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian Brazil, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
2008 - São Paulo SP - Nicolas Antoine Taunay in Brazil: A Reading of the Tropics, Pinacoteca do Estado
2009 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazilian Brazil, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
2010 - São Paulo SP - 6th SP-Arte, Fundação Bienal
2011 - São Paulo SP - Art in Brazil: A History at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Pinacoteca do Estado
Source: Itaú Cultural
