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GRAPHIC WORK

BUENOS AIRES (CITY AND CAMPAIGN)

View of the City of Buenos-Ayres. Madrid.

Printed etching from the original plate, illuminated. Measurements: 32.8 x 23.4 cm. Work in great condition, with its wide margins, framed.


Copper engraving made by Fernando Brambila at the end of the 18th century based on the drawings made by the Malaspina expedition during its visit to Buenos Aires. That sketch served Brambila to draw his gouache around 1794, which was entitled "View of Buenos Ayres from the Road of the Carretas" (the original was kept in the Bonifacio del Carril collection), and which would ultimately be the image which burin was transferred to the copper plate, with the addition of an imposing ombú on the right margin of the view.


It is undoubtedly one of the first iconographic images of the city of Buenos Aires, extremely rare. For the Argentine collector and scholar Alejo B. González Garaño, the engraving was printed by the Hydrographic Department of Madrid between 1795 and 1798. For some scholars, less than ten copies would have been preserved from that print run; one of them was cataloged in the book of the Guillermo H. Moores Collection (“Images and Views of the City of Buenos Aires”, plate 10, pp. 22). The truth is that well into the 19th century and using the original plate, the Madrid Hydrographic Department itself stamped it again in a version almost as elusive as the first for years.


Plates from both periods being always so rare, the view itself was spread with much more encouragement by another author's work; the learned D. Félix de Azara, who included it in his album “Voyages dans L´Amérique Méridionale” edited in Paris in 1809.


Unfortunately, the engraving that was executed for Azara's album, a Parisian work, inverted the original image, leaving the perspective changed, as if the view had been taken from the North instead of the South, in an error that was multiplied in an important number of versions, since Azara's lithograph was replicated by numerous travelers in their printed chronicles, becoming an iconic image of the city.


To be very precise, it should be noted that once Malaspina's expedition was over, fate played a trick on him. Regarding those hours, the scholar Aníbal Aguirre Saravia stated that “Once the expedition was concluded, Malaspina was warmly received by the Queen, although the intrigues of the Court, provoked by the jealous Godoy, darkened his horizon; he was imprisoned and then exiled. In such a scenario, the studies carried out on that trip remained unpublished in Spain and only in 1885 were they partially published.” Let's say that only a few images were stamped in his time, among them the View of Buenos Aires.



S.O.XIX - ESM
AUTHOR BRAMBILA, FERNANDO

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