Adrien Taunay the Younger

Aimé-Adrien Taunay
Portrait of Aimé-Adrien Taunay by his father
Born	October 1803 Paris, France
Died	(1828-01-05)5 January 1828 (aged 24) Guaporé River, near Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade, province of Mato Grosso, Empire of Brazil
Occupations	Painter draftsman scientific illustrator
Known for	voyage of the Uranie Langsdorff Expedition
Parents	Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (father) Marie-Joséphine Rondel (mother)
Relatives	Félix Émile Taunay (brother)

Aimé-Adrien Taunay (Paris, October 1803 – Guaporé River, 5 January 1828) was a French painter, draftsman, and scientific illustrator. A son of Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, he settled in Rio de Janeiro with his family in 1816 and learned drawing and painting from his father.

Before he turned fifteen, he joined the circumnavigation commanded by Louis de Freycinet aboard the corvette Uranie. He worked as an assistant to the draftsman Jacques Arago and alongside the expedition's naturalists. His drawings of animals, plants, inhabitants, and the places visited were used in the published volumes about the voyage.

After returning to Rio de Janeiro in 1820, he continued his studies and traveled through part of the province's interior in 1824. The notebook he used on that journey contains drawings, expenses, accounts of the route, personal reflections, and observations about residents of the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro.

In 1825, Taunay was hired as the first draftsman of the Langsdorff Expedition. He accompanied the river stage from São Paulo to Mato Grosso and produced studies of rivers, animals, plants, travelers, and inhabitants of the areas crossed. His final works include fifteen watercolors made during a brief stay among Bororo people. He died at the age of 24 while attempting to swim across the Guaporé River. His works are held in collections in Russia, Brazil, Australia, and Hawaii.

Early life and training

Portrait of Aimé-Adrien as a child, painted by his father, Nicolas-Antoine Taunay

Aimé-Adrien Taunay was born in Paris in October 1803. He was the fifth and youngest child of the painter Nicolas-Antoine Taunay and Marie-Joséphine Rondel. He grew up in a family of artists. His father painted landscapes and history subjects, while his uncle Auguste Marie Taunay worked as a sculptor. Nicolas-Antoine was his first teacher of drawing and painting.

The family landed in Rio de Janeiro on 26 March 1816 with the group of French artists led by Joachim Lebreton that became known as the French Artistic Mission. Aimé-Adrien was twelve years old. Nicolas-Antoine intended to remain in Brazil for six years and help establish a public art school, but the institution developed slowly. The Taunays settled in Tijuca, near the waterfall that would later bear the family name.

The Tijuca house received artists, naturalists, and foreign travelers passing through Rio de Janeiro. Aimé-Adrien listened to their conversations while learning from his father and drawing the surroundings. There he encountered subjects he had not known in Paris, including tropical vegetation, the bay, the mountains, and the city's inhabitants.

His brother Félix Émile Taunay also became a painter. Félix was appointed professor of landscape painting and directed the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts from 1834 to 1854.

Scientific illustration in nineteenth-century expeditions

Scientific expeditions in the early nineteenth century brought together naturalists, physicians, astronomers, cartographers, and draftsmen. While some members of the team measured positions, collected specimens, or wrote notes, the artist recorded on paper what could not be transported or what would change soon after collection.

A plant might wilt before reaching the ship. Fish, mollusks, and other animals lost their color or changed shape after death and preservation in alcohol. Birds and mammals had to be drawn while they still retained their posture and proportions. Artists also depicted ports, rivers, rock formations, buildings, canoes, tools, clothing, and ceremonies.

Photography was not yet part of fieldwork during Taunay's voyages. The oldest surviving photograph made with a camera, produced by Nicéphore Niépce at Le Gras, dates to about 1826 or 1827. It required an exposure of many hours and was not a practical tool for travelers aboard ships or moving through rivers and forests.

Botanical illustration of a silk floss tree by Aimé-Adrien Taunay

Natural-history drawings sought to assemble the features needed to identify an organism. Leaves, flowers, fruit, feathers, scales, and organs could be enlarged, separated, or shown from more than one angle on the same plate. Branches obscuring a flower could be removed, and details observed in different specimens could be combined into a single composition.

The work began with sketches in graphite, ink, or watercolor. The draftsman could note colors, measurements, and characteristics that did not fit within the image. After the voyage, the materials passed to engravers, lithographers, and printers. A published plate could combine the work of the person who observed the subject, the person who prepared the drawing, and the person who transferred it to the printing surface. The name printed on a plate therefore does not always identify its sole author.

Portraits of local inhabitants required other choices. The artist decided who would be drawn, in what pose, and with which objects. Clothing, body paint, weapons, tools, and dwellings were of interest in studies of customs, but the images also followed European conventions of composition.

These images were not neutral copies. Framing, pose, selected objects, and the time available all shaped the result. Reading them requires attention to what was placed on the sheet, what was left out, and the purpose for which the drawing was made.

Work as an illustrator aboard the Uranie

The corvette Uranie anchored off Rawak

Joining the expedition in Rio de Janeiro

On 17 September 1817, the French corvette Uranie left Toulon with 125 crew members under the command of Louis de Freycinet. The French government had instructed the expedition to expand the surveys made on earlier voyages. Freycinet planned to study the shape of the Earth, magnetism, meteorology, and the geographic positions of the places visited. The crew would also collect plants, animals, and minerals for French museums and take notes on the peoples encountered along the way.

The scientific staff included the physicians and naturalists Jean René Constant Quoy and Joseph Paul Gaimard, the botanist Charles Gaudichaud-Beaupré, and officers responsible for astronomical and hydrographic calculations. Jacques Arago was the voyage's official draftsman. His task was to record the places, inhabitants, animals, plants, vessels, and events encountered along the route.

The Uranie arrived in Rio de Janeiro on 6 December 1817. During a stop of nearly two months, the crew took measurements, resupplied the corvette, and collected specimens. The naturalists met the Taunay family, who had lived in the city since 1816. When the ship left Rio at the end of January 1818, Aimé-Adrien sailed with the expedition as Arago's assistant. He had not yet turned fifteen.

The contract and circumstances of his appointment are unknown. Aimé-Adrien had learned drawing and painting from his father and practiced around the family's home in Tijuca. Aboard the Uranie, he began working beside naturalists and drawing as part of the expedition's duties.

Natural-history drawings

Aimé-Adrien embarked as Arago's assistant but soon began working directly with Quoy and Gaimard. The naturalists depended on drawings made while animals were still alive or shortly after collection, before they changed color, shape, or posture. Fish, mollusks, and other marine organisms altered when preserved in alcohol, and certain details had to be recorded immediately after capture.

Among these images was a drawing of a mottled marsupial made while the animal was still alive. Jellyfish, anemones, and corals required the same speed because their translucent bodies became distorted outside the water. Taunay also drew fish, birds, reptiles, and plants. Quoy and Gaimard named a fish collected in Guam after him and published it as Chétodon Taunay.

The drawings were made in graphite, ink, or watercolor. Some sheets included notes on colors and proportions to guide the engravers who would prepare the printed plates in France. Between observation of the animal and publication of the image, the work could pass through the hands of the naturalist, the draftsman, and the engraver. Their contributions cannot always be separated, especially when Arago retouched a sketch by Taunay or when a drawing was transformed into an engraving.

On some sheets, Taunay signed himself "Taunay Jne fecit". The abbreviation came from Taunay jeune, or "young Taunay", and distinguished his work from that of Nicolas-Antoine. Quoy and Gaimard also referred to him as "A. Taunay fils" in the expedition's zoological texts.

Taunay also drew people, stretches of coastline, canoes, houses, clothing, and utensils. These images served the voyage's geographic and ethnographic tasks while preserving the artist's choices of pose, framing, and the objects placed beside the figures.

Arago remained the official draftsman of the Uranie and guided Taunay throughout the voyage. They worked side by side, although their respective tasks cannot always be distinguished in the published images. Arago assembled memories and drawings from the expedition in Promenade autour du monde, pendant les années 1817, 1818, 1819 et 1820, sur les corvettes du roi l'Uranie et la Physicienne, commandées par M. Freycinet, published in Paris in 1822.

Route through the Indian and Pacific oceans

After leaving Rio de Janeiro, the Uranie sailed to the Cape of Good Hope and crossed the Indian Ocean. In September 1818, the corvette spent fifteen days in Shark Bay on the western coast of Australia. The crew established a camp and observatory on the Peron Peninsula. There, officers made astronomical calculations, surveyed the coast, and collected plants and animals. Arago drew an encounter between crew members and Malgana people from the region.

The Uranie left Shark Bay on 26 September and continued to Timor. Its route passed Rawak, near the western coast of New Guinea, the Caroline Islands, Guam, and Hawaii, then known to Europeans as the Sandwich Islands. After crossing the Pacific, the corvette reached Port Jackson in Sydney, where it remained for about a month in late 1819.

At each stop, Taunay encountered animals, vessels, clothing, and customs unlike those he had known in Paris and Rio de Janeiro. His sheets show tropical birds, fish, canoes, island residents, and members of colonial administrations. In Hawaii, he painted a watercolor portrait of Governor Cox of Maui. Dated 1819, the work belongs to the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Green Parrot, a watercolor by Taunay, c. 1819, in the National Library of Australia

The watercolor Green Parrot, made around 1819, also belongs to this phase of the voyage. Taunay painted the bird in profile on a branch, isolated against a pale background. The sheet allows the viewer to examine the shape of the beak, wings, and tail, as well as the distribution of colors in the plumage. The work belongs to the National Library of Australia.

Shipwreck and return to Rio de Janeiro

The Uranie left Sydney on 25 December 1819. On 14 February 1820, it struck rocks in French Bay in the Falkland Islands. The damage made recovery of the vessel impossible. Everyone reached shore, but part of the herbarium and several drawings were lost. The crew removed the instruments, notes, and much of the collection assembled since the beginning of the voyage.

Freycinet purchased an American whaler to continue the journey and renamed it Physicienne. The vessel sailed to Rio de Janeiro and reached the city in late June 1820. Aimé-Adrien disembarked during this stop and did not accompany the expedition to France. The reason he remained in Brazil was not recorded. The rest of the team reached Le Havre on 13 November 1820.

Taunay returned to Rio de Janeiro after two years and five months at sea. He was sixteen and had already crossed the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans, drawn living animals, and worked alongside naturalists in ports and islands far from home.

Publication and dispersal of the works

Freycinet began publishing the results of the voyage in 1824 under the general title Voyage autour du monde, entrepris par ordre du Roi, exécuté sur les corvettes de S. M. l'Uranie et la Physicienne, pendant les années 1817, 1818, 1819 et 1820. The thirteen volumes combined texts and images on navigation, meteorology, magnetism, zoology, botany, languages, customs, and geography.

Five plates in the Atlas historique, published in 1825, were based wholly or partly on drawings by Aimé-Adrien: plates 10, 13, 50, 65, and 80. His studies were also used in images for the zoological volumes prepared by Quoy and Gaimard. Some plates retained his name. In others, his participation was reconstructed by comparing preparatory drawings, the naturalists' notes, and the printed engraving.

After publication, the expedition's drawings and papers followed different paths. The Australian National Maritime Museum, National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia, and Honolulu Museum of Art hold watercolors and drawings that Taunay made during the voyage. Other sheets remained in public and private collections in Brazil.

The passage of the images through the hands of Arago, the naturalists, and the engravers made it difficult to define the boundaries of Taunay's work. Comparison of original sheets, signatures, and printed plates has recovered part of his contribution.

Years on land (1820–1825)

Years in Tijuca and the Triumph of Bacchus

After disembarking in Rio de Janeiro in June 1820, Aimé-Adrien returned to the family home in Tijuca. The next four years are less well documented than his voyages aboard the Uranie and with the Langsdorff Expedition. During this interval, he devoted himself to reading, music, language study, drawing, and painting.

In 1821, Nicolas-Antoine returned to France with his wife and their son Hippolyte. Aimé-Adrien remained in Rio with three brothers and his uncle Auguste Marie, who died in 1824. The family property stood near the waterfall that came to be called Cascatinha Taunay.

Decades later, Alfredo d'Escragnolle Taunay, Aimé-Adrien's nephew, wrote that the young artist had painted a triumph of Bacchus on the walls of the house. Alfredo had not seen the work and based his account on memories passed down by Félix Émile and other family members. His narrative describes the composition but does not say when it was executed or which technique was used. The house disappeared, and the mural was not preserved.

The known drawings from these years are small graphite and watercolor studies of the surroundings of Rio de Janeiro, including forests, mountain ranges, rivers, and rural buildings. Some remained in a notebook measuring about 9 cm × 7 cm (3.5 in × 2.8 in) that was once held in a private collection in Rio de Janeiro. Another, slightly larger manuscript accompanied the 1824 journey to Morro Queimado and later entered the collection of the Museu Paulista.

Journey to Morro Queimado

On 18 June 1824, Aimé-Adrien dined at the home of the Count of Gestas and embarked for Praia Grande, present-day Niterói. He traveled with Louis, Martim, a Black man enslaved by the count, and two mules. At the opening of the diary, Taunay noted that the afternoon was beautiful and recorded "the pure sky, the magnificent bay" as the sun set over the water.

The group continued overland toward São Gonçalo and Itaboraí, following roads bordered by mangroves. They passed through the valleys of the Caceribu and Macacu rivers, the Venda do Colégio, the church of Santana de Japuíba, and the sugar plantation of Colonel Francisco Ferreira da Cunha. They then began the ascent of the Serra dos Órgãos on a narrow road between forest and steep slopes. The travelers reached the Swiss colony of Morro Queimado, present-day Nova Friburgo, on 22 June.

Taunay spent a week in the colony. He visited houses and plots occupied by Swiss and German settlers, spoke with residents, and observed work on their properties. He noted what they planted and ate and how the families adapted their activities to the terrain, climate, and products found in Brazil. His companions hunted along the way, and the diary mentions birds, deer, opossums, armadillos, and anteaters.

The journey offered little comfort. In São João de Itaboraí, Taunay slept on a table amid the noise from neighboring huts. In Santana, he spent the night fully dressed and wrapped in his blanket on a mat on the floor. During the mountain ascent, he faced cold, stony roads, and makeshift lodging in roadside shops, plantations, and private homes. His limited baggage consisted of clothing, pencils, a notebook, and a blanket.

The return journey began on 30 June. The group descended part of the same route, passed again through Colonel Ferreira's plantation, Santana, and the Venda do Colégio, and made a detour to the property of Ensign Constantino Barbosa. Aimé-Adrien crossed the bay again on 3 July. He first went to the Count of Gestas's house and that night met one of his brothers near the family's property in Tijuca. The journey lasted sixteen days.

Aimé-Adrien did not explain why he undertook the journey. His departure and return through the Count of Gestas's house, the companion supplied by the diplomat, and his attention to crops led Cecilia Helena de Salles Oliveira and João Carlos Cândido Silva Libardi Santos to suggest that it may have served as an economic reconnaissance. The route could have interested French merchants assessing land, immigrant colonies, and agricultural crops in the province of Rio de Janeiro. The manuscript neither confirms this hypothesis nor states who paid the expenses.

Travel notebook

Form and contents

The notebook used by Taunay measures 15.2 cm × 10 cm (6.0 in × 3.9 in) and has 93 pages. It was written mainly in French, in graphite and iron gall ink. The first two pages list expenses for transportation, lodging, meals, and provisions. Pages 3–64 form the diary of the June and July 1824 journey. The remaining pages contain notes made through early 1825.

Aimé-Adrien combined drawings, calculations, and brief observations. He wrote about roads, rivers, mountain ranges, animals, trees, and crops. He also recorded stories heard at roadside shops and farms, excerpts from poems, philosophical reflections, Masonic studies, and comments on events in Rio de Janeiro. The notebook was not prepared for publication. Its punctuation is irregular, some sentences break off, and certain ideas reappear in widely separated parts of the manuscript.

The pages follow the people Taunay encountered along the route, including rural landowners, Swiss settlers, enslaved workers, muleteers, clerks, members of the clergy, Indigenous people, and foreign travelers. He recorded conversations about politics, literature, and local problems, as well as incidents such as delays in departure, uncomfortable rooms, and arguments with his companions.

Food occupies part of the entries. Taunay encountered fields of coffee, sugarcane, rice, bananas, oranges, and alfalfa. In the homes of Swiss settlers, he ate fresh cheese with cornmeal, banana cake, cornbread with butter, and pancakes. These were recipes brought from Europe and remade with local ingredients.

In an entry dated 2 July, Taunay wrote about his difficulty acting decisively and providing his parents with a more comfortable life. The passage brings together guilt, indecision, and anxiety about the future, feelings that recur in letters he sent to his family during the Langsdorff Expedition.

Acquisition, restoration, and interpretation

The notebook remained with the family's descendants. In 2003, the Museu Paulista acquired from Angélica Ulhôa Cintra Taunay a group of materials from the estate of her husband, Augusto d'Escragnolle Taunay, a son of Afonso d'Escragnolle Taunay. The manuscripts reached the museum's Historical Documentation and Iconography Service in 2004.

The manuscript arrived without a cover, with broken binding, brittle leaves, and corrosion caused by iron gall ink. In 2011, the Museu Paulista and the Instituto Hercule Florence formed a partnership to photograph, restore, and study it. The notebook was disbound, cleaned, stabilized, and rebound. Treatment was carried out by the Edson Motta Conservation and Restoration Laboratory at Senai under the supervision of the Museu Paulista's Paper Conservation Laboratory.

The first digitization made much of the ink text legible but left a nearly erased layer of graphite beneath stains and later writing. Between 2014 and 2015, the Institute of Physics of the University of São Paulo photographed the pages using infrared reflectography. The examination recovered texts and drawings hidden by ink on thirteen pages of the notebook.

Thierry Thomas transcribed the French text, and Marcia Valéria Martinez de Aguiar prepared the Portuguese translation. Parts of the paper had been lost, and Taunay's writing alternated among abbreviations, deletions, and incomplete sentences. Conventional images, infrared photographs, the transcription, and the translation were brought together in the digital project O caderno de Aimé-Adrien Taunay: histórias, descobertas e percursos, which opened to the public in 2019.

Family and the Academy of Fine Arts

While Aimé-Adrien studied and traveled through the interior of Rio de Janeiro Province, Félix Émile began working on the project for the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1824, before the institution formally opened, he took up its chair of landscape painting. The academy was inaugurated in 1826. Félix became director in 1834 and remained in office until 1854.

In early 1825, Georg von Langsdorff hired Aimé-Adrien to replace Johann Moritz Rugendas as the first draftsman of his expedition. At the age of 21, he returned to the routine of a scientific team and began preparing for the journey from São Paulo toward Mato Grosso and the Amazon basin.

Langsdorff Expedition

Route of the Langsdorff Expedition through the Brazilian interior

Appointment and preparations

Georg von Langsdorff was a physician, naturalist, and consul general of the Russian Empire in Rio de Janeiro. With the support of Emperor Alexander I, he organized a journey through the interior of Brazil financed by the Russian government. Its program combined geographic and astronomical observations, the collection of plants, animals, and minerals, the study of populations encountered along the route, and a survey of products that might interest commerce. The mission also brought together Russia's scientific and diplomatic interests in a country that had only recently become independent.

Langsdorff had been preparing the project for several years. At Fazenda da Mandioca, his estate near Rio de Janeiro, he maintained natural-history collections and received travelers passing through the imperial court. The first field stage began in 1824 with a journey through Minas Gerais. The group included the botanist Ludwig Riedel, the Russian astronomer and cartographer Nester Rubtsov, and the German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, hired as first draftsman.

Rugendas broke with Langsdorff in November 1824 while the team was traveling through Minas Gerais. They disagreed about the pace of work, control of the drawings, and the way the images should serve the expedition's tasks. Rugendas left the group and continued traveling through Brazil on his own.

In early 1825, Langsdorff invited Aimé-Adrien to replace him. Taunay was 21 and had already worked with naturalists during the circumnavigation of the Uranie. He became first draftsman, while Hércules Florence served as second draftsman. Riedel handled botanical collecting, and Rubtsov was responsible for astronomical measurements, maps, and route surveys. The journey also depended on guides, pilots, hunters, rowers, and enslaved people.

Taunay left Rio de Janeiro with the team in the second half of 1825. After landing in Santos, the group passed through São Paulo and Itu before settling in Porto Feliz, the departure point for river journeys to Mato Grosso. Preparations took months. They had to obtain boats, hire men who knew the rivers, and assemble provisions, instruments, medicines, and materials for collecting specimens.

From Porto Feliz to Cuiabá

Departure of the Langsdorff Expedition on the Tietê River, watercolor by Aimé-Adrien Taunay

On 22 June 1826, four vessels left Porto Feliz: the canoes Peroba and Ximbó, a large cargo boat, and a smaller canoe used to move between the boats and the banks. The expedition traveled down the Tietê River, crossed the Paraná River, and began ascending the Pardo toward the interior of Mato Grosso.

The route followed part of the old monções route, river journeys that carried people, goods, and correspondence between São Paulo and Cuiabá. The expedition used passages known to pilots and rowers but carried instruments, papers, and containers intended for scientific observations and collections.

Rapids and waterfalls repeatedly interrupted navigation. At these stretches, the travelers unloaded the canoes, carried the cargo along the bank, and hauled the vessels with ropes. Work slowed during rains, when the current strengthened and provisions had to be protected from the water. In shallow places, the rowers pushed the boats.

In the Camapuã region, the cargo was carried overland from the upper Pardo to the Coxim River. This crossing linked the Paraná and Paraguay basins. The group descended the Coxim and Taquari rivers, reached the Paraguay River, and continued along the São Lourenço and Cuiabá rivers.

Aimé-Adrien drew during stops and at camps. His watercolor of the departure from Porto Feliz shows the canoes still near the port, with crew members, rowers, and cargo distributed among the vessels. Along the rest of the route, he sketched rivers, rapids, forests, and people encountered on the banks.

The expedition reached Cuiabá on 30 January 1827 after slightly more than seven months of travel. The team remained in the city until December. During that interval, its members organized the collections, copied notes, recovered from illnesses contracted along the route, and made shorter journeys in the surrounding area. Cuiabá served as the base for preparing the two routes that would take the expedition toward the Amazon.

Division of the expedition and journey with Riedel

Relations between Taunay and Langsdorff deteriorated on the way to Cuiabá. Langsdorff expected finished drawings produced regularly and ready to enter the mission's archive. Taunay worked rapidly when a subject interested him but left some sketches to complete later. In Cuiabá, he wrote that he intended to organize his studies and turn them into more finished works after returning from the journey.

Dividing the team made it possible to examine two routes toward Pará and separated Taunay from the commander after the conflicts of the preceding months. Langsdorff, Rubtsov, and Florence would follow the Preto, Arinos, Juruena, and Tapajós rivers. Taunay would accompany Riedel to Vila Bela de Mato Grosso and descend the Guaporé, Mamoré, Madeira, and Amazon rivers. The groups planned to reunite in Pará.

Langsdorff placed Riedel in charge of this part of the journey and asked him to try to secure the draftsman's regular cooperation. The instruction ended bluntly: "If he does not help you in any way, I authorize you to dismiss him."

Taunay and Riedel left Cuiabá in November 1827. On the way to Vila Bela, they passed through the village of Pau Seco, where Taunay spent a few days among Bororo people. There he made fifteen watercolors showing people, ornaments, body painting, utensils, and parts of the village. The group would be among his final works.

The two men reached Vila Bela on 18 December. While waiting for the proper season to navigate the Guaporé, they stayed in the former palace of the captains-general, then almost empty. From one of its rooms, Taunay wrote to his brothers Félix and Théodore on 20 December. He explained that the groups had taken different routes and that no one yet knew how the journey would end. "The expedition is in such confusion that it is impossible to make conjectures about its future," he wrote. In the same letter, he said that his temperament was melancholy, although he tried to present a cheerful appearance.

Death in the Guaporé River

On 30 December 1827, Taunay and Riedel left Vila Bela to visit Casalvasco, a post near the border with Bolivia. They remained in the region for several days and gathered information about Chiquitano people living nearby. They began the return journey on the morning of 5 January 1828.

Taunay rode ahead on horseback. A storm erased the trail markings, and Riedel lost sight of him. After becoming disoriented and crossing the Alegre River twice, Taunay reached the bank of the Guaporé opposite Vila Bela, a short distance upstream from the port. A local woman showed him the way to the river, and a laundress called the boatman responsible for the crossing.

The river was swollen by rain. Although the woman pointed out that the canoe was approaching, Taunay left his horse on the bank and entered the water. Riedel wrote that the artist "reaches the middle of the river, loses his strength" and disappears before the boatman could reach him.

Residents and authorities searched for the body that day and the following morning. It was found before dawn on 8 January and taken to Vila Bela. Taunay was buried in the church of Santo Antônio near the port and received religious rites arranged by local authorities.

Riedel informed Aimé-Adrien's brothers of his death in a letter dated 10 January. In March, he sent a longer account describing the route to Casalvasco, the storm, the attempted crossing, and the search for the body. The brothers received the news in Rio de Janeiro and then passed it to their parents, who lived in France.

Work for the Langsdorff Expedition

Working methods and subjects

Study of a toucan by Taunay, 1826

Hércules Florence estimated that Taunay produced nearly 230 drawings for the Langsdorff Expedition. The figure was an estimate by a traveling companion, not a count of located and cataloged sheets. Some of the material was lost or followed unknown paths. The largest surviving group is held by the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Taunay worked in graphite, pen and ink, ink wash, and watercolor on paper. He drew on riverbanks, at camps, and during longer stops. Some sheets were carefully finished. Others preserve the speed of work done in transit, with incomplete outlines, abbreviated notes, and areas left only in graphite.

The artist often wrote on the backs of the sheets. He added place names, dates, characteristics of the vegetation, river courses, and information about the people portrayed. Text and image did not always perform the same task. A watercolor might focus on a scene beside a river, while the note on the reverse discussed headwaters, tributaries, or the presence of gold and diamonds.

Instructions given by Langsdorff to the expedition's members in February 1826 required Taunay to draw the scenes and objects requested by the botanist Ludwig Riedel. These included individual plants and details useful for classification. The artist also drew animals, vessels, waterfalls, settlements, and inhabitants encountered along the route.

Hércules Florence worked as second draftsman and also handled maps and geographic notes. The two artists' duties sometimes overlapped, especially when they visited the same place. Florence tended to produce more regular sequences aligned with the expedition's progress. Taunay made rapid sketches and often returned to subjects that interested him most. After the expedition divided in Cuiabá, each artist followed a different route.

Family from the Brazilian interior traveling, a watercolor produced by Taunay during the Langsdorff Expedition

Taunay's works include natural-history studies and scenes in which rivers, vegetation, and inhabitants share the same sheet. In the 1827 work Quilombo River in the District of Chapada, two women wash clothes beside the water. The scene includes a bench, a basket, a wood-burning stove, and a long-stemmed pipe. On the reverse, Taunay recorded the river's source and course, mentioned gold and diamond workings, and explained its connection with the Manso and Cuiabá rivers.

In Palms Called Buriti, Drawn at Quilombo, District of Chapada, the artist combined a study of the palm with three Guaná travelers. The note on the reverse states that the buriti grew in wet ground and could reach about sixty feet along the banks of the Pardo River. It also records that the men traveled among farms and sugar plantations in search of work. The sheet combines a botanical observation with a scene of movement through the interior.

View of the district of Chapada, 1827

Taunay devoted twelve views to the Chapada dos Guimarães region. The group preserved in St. Petersburg contains graphite drawings, ink washes, and watercolors, most of them without final finishing. The artist wanted to remain longer in Chapada, but Langsdorff ordered him to return to Cuiabá and left Florence at the site. The episode deepened the dispute between them.

Langsdorff expected to receive completed drawings regularly, ready for the expedition's archive. Taunay regarded the field studies as material still to be ordered and worked over. In April 1827, he gave the commander 42 drawings intended for St. Petersburg but explained that he planned to gather and rework some of the studies after the journey. Repeated changes of camp and the need to collect new subjects left him no time to finish everything along the way.

This difference appears in Langsdorff's criticism of sheets he considered incomplete or inaccurate. Taunay resisted the commander's interventions and wanted to decide how the images would be completed. The tension did not divide science and art into simple opposing camps. His drawings contained information requested by the naturalists as well as choices of composition, color, and movement that went beyond a classification record.

Despite his complaints, Langsdorff acknowledged the speed at which Taunay worked when focused. He wrote that Taunay could produce more in an hour than another artist in half a day. Remembering his companion after his death, Florence likewise credited him with "brilliant gifts for painting".

Self-portrait of Aimé-Adrien Taunay

Langsdorff also wrote that Taunay drew without requiring constant corrections and could portray from memory people he had seen only briefly. The commander praised his imagination and aptitude for music and mechanics but criticized his irregular work habits and reluctance to finish sketches.

Bororo studies

In December 1827, during the journey from Cuiabá to Vila Bela de Mato Grosso, Taunay spent several days in the village of Pau Seco. Its inhabitants belonged to the group then called Western Bororo by travelers. The encounter was brief, and the artist arrived with little information about the people and objects he would find. The drawings were made in front of his sitters and near the village.

Taunay produced fifteen sheets in graphite and watercolor. He drew residents, ornaments, body painting, utensils, and parts of the village. The series belongs to the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences and is among his final works.

Bororo villages were arranged in a circle, with houses placed around a central space. This layout corresponded to the division of society into moieties and clans. Some of Taunay's sheets show the dwellings and the spaces between them but do not explain their use or social organization. Comparison with later ethnographic work has connected details in the watercolors with customs that the artist did not discuss in writing.

The sheet titled Bororo Man and Woman contains three figures. At right is a woman with a shaved head and a child on her shoulder. She wears a broad belt and few ornaments. Small horizontal lines cover parts of her torso and legs. The girl wears necklaces, earrings, and cords tied around her arms and legs.

The male figure was placed behind a low wall. Taunay concentrated the drawing on the head and upper body. The man wears a feather headdress, has part of his face painted red, and has a dark outline around his mouth. Objects pass through his ears, nose, and lower lip.

The Russian ethnologist G. G. Manizer examined the sheet in 1948. He was struck by the woman's posture, with one foot resting against the opposite leg, and by the horizontal lines painted on her body. In 1975, the anthropologist Thekla Hartmann compared reproductions of the watercolor with information in the Enciclopédia Bororo and with her own field experience. She recognized in the series the broad belt worn by women, crescent-shaped earrings, men's head ornaments, lip pendants, a penis sheath, and bands worn by girls below the knees.

Hartmann also noted absences. Certain ornaments mentioned in ethnographic texts were not drawn by Taunay, perhaps because they were not in use during the days of his visit. The series represents what he encountered at Pau Seco at that moment, not a complete inventory of Bororo clothing and objects.

Maria de Fátima Costa interpreted the female figure's shaved head, lack of ornaments, and body markings as signs of mourning. The belt may also have been connected with participation in a funeral. This interpretation comes from comparison with ethnographic literature and does not prove that Taunay understood the meaning of each element. The drawing preserves visible details whose meanings were studied long after the artist's visit.

The fifteen sheets do not form a complete portrait of Bororo society. Taunay was a European visitor, spent little time in the village, and chose which people, gestures, and objects to place on paper. His attention to body painting, ornaments, and differences between adults and children, however, kept his figures from becoming a generic image of Indigenous people. Each person was given individual features, posture, and objects.

Images as historical sources

The drawings made for the Langsdorff Expedition contain information that rarely occupies the center of travel diaries. The sheets show how cargo was distributed among canoes, the clothing worn by travelers and residents, objects carried along the routes, forms of work on riverbanks, and the arrangement of houses and villages. Studies of animals and plants preserve forms and colors that could disappear when specimens were killed or prepared for transport.

Taunay's notes expand this content. A drawing of palm trees includes information about the terrain in which they grew and their height. A river view gives information about tributaries, mining sites, and routes. Human figures appear with tools, pipes, baskets, weapons, ornaments, and provisions. These details can be compared with the expedition's diaries, maps, botanical collections, and texts by other travelers.

The images were made by an artist who chose the viewpoint, moved figures nearer or farther away, and arranged objects within the sheet. Some scenes were finished in watercolor, while others remained sketches. The search for a clear composition could alter the positions of observed elements.

Titles and notes preserve classifications of color, origin, and ethnic affiliation used by members of the expedition. These expressions belong to nineteenth-century European and Luso-Brazilian vocabulary and are not neutral definitions of the people depicted.

The same care applies to studies of Indigenous peoples. Body painting and ornaments can be compared with ethnographic sources, but an image alone does not explain the meaning of each sign. The duration of the encounter, instructions received, materials available, and conventions learned by the artist all shaped the result. Interpretation of these sheets depends on comparison with notes, letters, and information about the circumstances in which they were made.

Collections and later scholarship

Organization and destination of the materials

The drawings began their journey to Russia before the expedition ended. Langsdorff prepared lists of works and sent them to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences whenever he found secure means of transportation. Documentation examined by Boris Komissarov mentions four shipments. The first, prepared in February 1826, contained twelve drawings. Two others, with 74 and 68 sheets, were organized in April and October 1827. The fourth departed in June 1829 with 327 drawings.

The first three shipments probably did not reach their destination. The last contained most of the sheets preserved in Russia. Komissarov's survey found 151 drawings by Aimé-Adrien, 139 by Hércules Florence, and 79 by Johann Moritz Rugendas in the archive. Rugendas had taken about five hundred works with him when he left the expedition in 1824. These drawings were dispersed among institutions and private collections in Europe and Brazil.

Taunay's sheets were not fully inventoried during the journey. Langsdorff kept lists of shipments, while Taunay and Florence wrote captions in French on some drawings. These inscriptions identified places, people, species, and episodes along the route. Florence also helped preserve the order of the material after Taunay's death and, with the permission of the Russian authorities, prepared copies of his own works.

In 1830, the papers and collections still in Brazil were sent to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Manuscripts, maps, and drawings went to the institution's archives. Botanical and zoological specimens and ethnographic objects were distributed among Russian museums and scientific centers.

The principal group of Taunay's drawings for the Langsdorff Expedition is held by the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The institution received its present name in 1991. Its collections include records formed by the former St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and its successors during the Soviet period.

Other works and documents remained outside Russia. The Moreira Salles Institute holds the watercolor Departure of the Langsdorff Expedition on the Tietê River. The Museu Paulista preserves papers from the Taunay family, including the 1824 travel notebook and documents used by descendants in writing the first accounts of Aimé-Adrien.

Revival of scholarship and publications

Langsdorff's illness prevented him from organizing the expedition's results and preparing a general publication. Part of the journey became known through Florence's account, translated by Alfredo d'Escragnolle Taunay and published in 1875 and 1876 in the Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro. The drawings sent to Russia remained difficult to access outside the academy.

The phrase "rediscovery in 1930" summarizes a process that had begun several years earlier. Soviet researchers had already discussed the expedition at congresses held in 1926 and 1928. In 1930, a scientific employee of the Archive of the Academy of Sciences named Modzalevsky located and assembled the principal body of documentation. This work opened the way for classification of the sheets.

The ethnographer N. G. Sprintsin worked with manuscripts and images in the archive and in 1948 published the study that Genrikh Manizer had prepared on the expedition. Sprintsin and the linguist O. K. Vasilieva-Shvede also examined the Indigenous vocabularies collected by the travelers. Beginning in the 1960s, Boris Komissarov published studies of the diaries, correspondence, maps, and iconography.

In Brazil, Gilberto Ferrez tried to obtain information about the collection in 1940. A letter from him was forwarded to the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union through Jorge Amado. In 1946, Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, then director of the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Service, informed Dom Clemente Maria da Silva-Nigra that Brazilian material was preserved in Soviet institutions.

Dom Clemente, director of the Museum of Sacred Art of Bahia, visited the archive in Leningrad in 1963. The following year, he published a report on the collection in the magazine O Cruzeiro. A cultural mission associated with Diários Associados attempted to negotiate reproductions and publications, but the project was interrupted after the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état.

During the 1970s, Soviet researchers prepared a catalog of materials held in the country's archives. A Portuguese edition was published by Fundação Nacional Pró-Memória in 1981 and contained about eight hundred entries for manuscripts, maps, drawings, and other documents. The catalog clarified that the expedition's papers were not concentrated in a single building. Some were held by the Leningrad branch of the Archive of the Academy of Sciences, while others were in diplomatic, naval, and administrative archives.

In 1987, Brazilian representatives visited Moscow and Leningrad to examine the material and negotiate loans. The following year, the three-volume publication Expedição Langsdorff ao Brasil, 1821–1829 reproduced drawings by Rugendas, Taunay, and Florence cataloged in Russia. The second volume was devoted to Aimé-Adrien's watercolors and drawings.

Study of the sources continued through agreements between Russian and Brazilian institutions. In 1989, the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and the University of Brasília signed a protocol for research and publication of the manuscripts, maps, and images. Komissarov traced the documentary history of the mission in Expedição Langsdorff: acervo e fontes históricas, published in Portuguese in 1994.

Langsdorff's diaries received a three-volume Brazilian edition in 1997. The publication brought together notebooks written from 1824 to 1828, with translations, notes, and studies prepared by Brazilian, German, and Russian researchers. The edition made it possible to compare Taunay's images with the commander's daily notes and the expedition's itineraries.

Exhibitions

The traveling exhibition Langsdorff de volta, held in 1988, brought to Brazil original works lent by the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. The exhibition included drawings and watercolors by Rugendas, Taunay, and Florence. It opened at the Itamaraty Palace in Brasília and traveled to the Palácio da Instrução in Cuiabá, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, and the Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro.

Taunay's works were also included in group exhibitions on traveling artists and images of Brazil. In November and December 1990, they appeared in Missão Artística Francesa e Pintores Viajantes: França–Brasil no século XIX at Casa França-Brasil in Rio de Janeiro.

In 1992, works by the artist were shown in Brasilien: Entdeckung und Selbstentdeckung at the Kunsthaus Zürich during Zurich's Junifestwochen devoted to Brazil. One section of the program, Bilderwelt Brasilien: Die europäische Erkundung eines "irdischen Paradieses" und die Kunst der brasilianischen Moderne, remained open from 22 May to 26 July. The exhibition combined images produced by European travelers with works of Brazilian modern art.

In 1995, the project O Brasil de Hoje no Espelho do Século XIX brought artists and researchers together for a journey along portions of the route taken by the Langsdorff Expedition. The initiative was directed by Dieter Strauss, then director of the Goethe-Institut in São Paulo, supported by the institute, and sponsored by Siemens. The artists Carlos Vergara, José Fujocka, Olaf Nicolai, Michael Fahres, and Anatoli Juravlev traveled alongside researchers, journalists, and a film crew.

The works produced on that journey were exhibited beside drawings by Rugendas, Taunay, and Florence. The exhibition opened at the São Paulo Museum of Art on 26 November 1995 and remained there until 20 January 1996. During 1996, it traveled to the Sala Athos Bulcão in Brasília, Casa França-Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art of Curitiba.

For the installation at MASP, the organizers assembled works from the St. Petersburg archive, 18 works from six Brazilian public collections, and 51 works from eight private collections in the country. The exhibition also included ten manuscripts from the Russian archive and another from a private archive.

In 2000, works by Taunay appeared in the section O Olhar Distante of Brasil + 500 Mostra do Redescobrimento at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in São Paulo. The section brought together images of the country produced by foreign artists from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries.

In 2010, the exhibition Expedição Langsdorff traveled among the São Paulo, Brasília, and Rio de Janeiro branches of the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil. It brought together drawings, watercolors, manuscripts, maps, and instruments. Some of the material came from the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Naval Archive. Taunay's works were displayed alongside those of Rugendas and Florence, following the order of the journey and the team's fields of work.

The catalog of the 2010 exhibition contained reproductions, essays on the participants, and texts devoted to the history of the archive. It also discussed the portion of the manuscripts that had not yet received a complete edition. The material preserved in St. Petersburg is more extensive than the selection shown in exhibitions or reproduced in albums published in Brazil.

Gallery

• 
  Autumn Landscape, date unknown
• 
  Cox, Governor of Maui, 1819, ink and watercolor over graphite
• 
  Hawaiian Lobster, 1819, watercolor
• 
  Study of Euryzygomatomys spinosus, 1826, watercolor
• 
  Wealthy resident of São Paulo leading his mules loaded with sugar, 1825, watercolor and ink
• 
  Zoological plate by Antoine-Germain Bévalet, based on a drawing by Taunay
• 
  Zoological plate partly based on drawings by Taunay, published in 1825
• 
  Plate of Anampses cuvier and Gomphosus varius, based on drawings by Taunay and Antoine-Germain Bévalet
• 
  Plate of Coris gaimard and Cheilio inermis, based on drawings by Taunay and Antoine-Germain Bévalet
• 
  Objects used in the Mariana Islands, an engraving based on a drawing by Taunay

See also

• Brazilian Romantic painting, artistic movement developed in Brazil during the nineteenth century
• Brazilian painting, overview of painting in Brazil and the work of traveling artists
• Landscape painting, genre practiced by Taunay and central to his family training
• Scientific illustration, use of drawing to record species, objects, and scientific observations
• Viagem fluvial do Tietê ao Amazonas, Hércules Florence's account of the Langsdorff Expedition

External links

Media related to Adrien Taunay at Wikimedia Commons