This thesis examines three of German Romanticism’s fundamental pictorial topics in Chile: portraits of people, landscape painting, and nature illustrations. It proposes a new interpretation of paintings, drawings, and illustrations by six German Romantic artists and scientists: Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858), Carl Alexander Simon (1805-1852), Otto Grashof (1812-1876), Theodor Ohlsen (1855-1913), Eduard Poeppig (1798-1868) and Rudolph Amandus Philippi (1808-1904). The first part of this investigation unravels the underlying discourses in many depictions of Indigenous populations rendered by German Romantics in Chile between 1800 and 1899. It explores the impact of contentious and deep- rooted conceptions of race prompted by phrenology, anthropology, and comparative anatomy — the so-called “Romantic sciences” — on the portrayal of Indigenous people and mestizos of Chile. The second part enquires into the different factual and symbolic forms of exerting dominion over the territory through landscape paintings and mapping operations. Three main matters are at the centre of this discussion: the representation of topographical landscapes in which German artists adopted a cultural and physical vantage point to represent the surroundings, the projection of an idea of Paradise onto natural settings, and the impact of scientific disciplines such as geology, geography, and anthropology on two fundamental aesthetic categories of landscape: the picturesque and the sublime. The last part of this research focuses on the Germans’ universalising model of classifying and depicting Chile’s nature using taxonomic schemes and poetic rhetoric. In this section, nature illustrations are scrutinised under the postulate that far beyond being an anodyne form of craft, these images were loaded with ideological presumptions not always evident at first glance. In other words, they would have operated as artifacts to the impose Western episteme systematically. Throughout this research, the analysis of these subjects is connected with the German colonisation of the south of Chile, which started in the mid-nineteenth century, playing a fundamental part in Germans’ visual and written representation of the country. Overall, this investigation seeks to shed new light on the intricate cultural exchanges between Germany and Chile throughout an era obsessed with progress, racial origins, evolution, and the cataloguing of nature. With this, it aims to contribute to a broader understanding of how Romantic explorers, by means of the sciences and arts, forged the image of Chile and South America two centuries ago.
