Cascatinha Taunay
There is a waterfall in the Tijuca forest that bears a painter’s name. Most people who hike past it today — through one of the densest urban forests in the world, away from the noise of Rio de Janeiro — have no idea who Nicolas-Antoine Taunay was, or why a French academician who spent just five years in Brazil in the early nineteenth century left his name on a cascade in the mountains above the city. I grew up with that forest at my back. The forest was always there, a green wall above the neighborhoods, the place you went when the city became too much. It did not occur to me, as a child, to ask who Taunay was. The answer, it turns out, involves Napoleon, a displaced Portuguese court, and a chain of geopolitical accidents so improbable that the art history it produced seems almost unearned.
Look at the painting Taunay made at the cascade and the first thing that strikes you is the format: vertical, almost aggressively so, the opposite of the horizontal sweep that French landscape convention demanded. A sheer rock face occupies the left third — warm-toned, massive, geological in its indifference to the painter below. There is no open horizon, no luminous distance, none of the tonal recession that structured the tradition Taunay had spent forty years working within. The canonical picturesque progression is here disorganized: the brightest point is the apex of the canvas, where pale light bleaches the sky above the diagonal treeline. The cascade itself — the ostensible subject — appears not as a sublime spectacle but as a faint, misty presence deep in the middle distance, glimpsed between rock and tree. You almost miss it. At the very bottom, almost as an afterthought: Taunay at his easel, two enslaved men watching him work, an open parasol registering the tropical sun he found so difficult to capture — figures so small they function as staffage, the conventional human presences inserted to give scale to terrain. Except that Taunay has inserted himself. The appointed landscape painter of the French mission, a member of the Institut de France, reduced in his own painting to a compositional device.
‘Taunay gave himself immortality: he will live in Rio de Janeiro as long as this painting exists.’
To understand how Taunay arrived at this waterfall, you must go back to November 1807, when Napoleon’s troops crossed into Portugal and the Braganza court fled Lisbon. Simultaneously, in the Paris Salon of 1808, the French painter was showing seven works, most of them Napoleonic subjects: the Emperor’s entry into Munich, the Empress receiving artists, a courier bringing news of victory. Among all that official machinery, one small genre scene: a billiard room, a gaming table, a scruffy dog, the figure of Victory holding a money purse instead of a palm — a small act of resistance by a painter who never entirely surrendered his instincts to the demands of the Empire. The two events seem entirely unconnected. They are the hinge of the same historical moment, and they converged eight years later in a way nobody could have predicted.
Dom João arrived in Rio in March 1808 and immediately began dismantling three centuries of colonial restriction: ports opened to friendly nations, the printing press arrived, industries were permitted for the first time. Until then Brazil had been sealed from the world in ways designed to guarantee provincial suffocation — no universities, no manufacturing, trade conducted exclusively through Portuguese intermediaries. Such precautions were only partially justified: Rio had been the target of French colonial ambition since 1555, and the Dutch had occupied the Northeast of Brazil throughout much of the seventeenth century. If the former generated woodcuts and polished copperplates of Tupinambá cannibals that fired the European imagination, the latter resulted in a rich pictorial legacy born of the extended stays of Frans Post and Albert Eckhout in Brazil. The groundwork for Brazil’s independence in 1822 was laid, almost inadvertently, by a French general’s ambition.
By 1815, Napoleon was finished. The artists who had flourished under his patronage found themselves politically exposed under the Bourbon Restoration. Taunay, at sixty-one, had additional reasons for anxiety: his son Charles had created a public scandal at the Institut de France, accosting the Duke of Angoulême at a formal ceremony to demand the Legion of Honor for his father. When the opportunity arose to join a French artistic mission commissioned by Dom João — through his ambassador in Paris and the Comte de Barca, an Enlightenment enthusiast who had long admired French culture — Taunay saw in it something between an opportunity and an escape.
The artistic mission was remarkable. The Real Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City had preceded it, founded in 1785 — the first academy of fine arts in the Americas. The Brazilian academy emerged from chaos: a French institution transplanted into a Portuguese court in exile, in a city that had been a capital for barely a decade, shaped by Joachim Lebreton’s Enlightenment conviction that fine and applied arts should be taught together. Taunay was appointed specifically as the mission’s landscape painter. The Escola Real das Ciências, Artes e Ofícios was founded by royal decree on August 12, 1816 — but would not open formally until 1826, by which point it had been reorganized and renamed the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes — five years after Taunay had already gone home.
Before the disappointments accumulated, there was the landscape. Taunay’s move to Tijuca — to a property of twenty-two hectares around the cascade, where he planted coffee and built a house in the mountains above the city — was not simply a retreat from a court that had failed to appreciate him. It was also an aesthetic choice, made in full awareness of what European culture had decided the Americas should look like. Alexander von Humboldt, whose five-year journey through Spanish America had transformed how Europeans imagined the New World, had established a model: the tropics offered compositional drama, biological density, and chromatic intensity. His Vues des Cordillères taught European painters and collectors to desire exactly the kind of site Taunay found in Tijuca — the waterfall, the forest canopy, the view from the mountain. The picturesque, as practiced by European travelers in the Americas, was a way of making sense of a landscape that exceeded every inherited category for organizing it.
But the picturesque required distance. Its theorists were emphatic: the painter must stand back from his subject, compose it, allow the eye to travel through planes of organized recession. The Tijuca forest refused this. Johann Moritz Rugendas, who arrived in Brazil the year Taunay left, understood the problem: the native forest was simultaneously the most interesting and the least paintable landscape in the country — too close, too dense, impossible to stand outside of. The light compounded everything. In Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss, arriving in Brazil by ship a century later, found himself baffled by the same quality: ‘The ocean, lit indirectly by the rays of an invisible sun, offers an oily and unvarying reflection that reverses the normal light-values of air and water.’ Taunay faced the same reversal on land: the Brazilian sunset, unlike its European counterpart, is abrupt — minutes, not hours. The long chromatic transitions that gave French landscape painting its melancholy depth simply did not exist here. Vera Beatriz Siqueira, writing about Taunay’s Brazilian work, frames this as an almost existential dilemma: Taunay himself asked how one could ‘capture the tropical sun, which steals time and insists on running.’ Post, a generation earlier, had faced the same problem in Pernambuco and left it largely unresolved — the northeastern light in his canvases flattened rather than illuminated.
His solution, when he found sufficient elevation, was remarkable. In the views painted from the heights above the city — from Boa Vista, from the convent of Santo Antônio — something genuinely new occurs. The light becomes uniform across all planes rather than receding from dark to luminous. The geometric forms of Rio’s colonial architecture create articulation where his European paintings found only tonal transition. The bay and the sky converge until the horizon nearly disappears.
‘The ocean, lit indirectly by the rays of an invisible sun, offers an oily and unvarying reflection that reverses the normal light-values of air and water.’
I know these views. The bay from the hills above Santa Teresa, the Sugarloaf framed by forest, the late afternoon light that whitewashes the air and turns the mountains purple — these are not framed compositions for someone who grew up inside them. They are simply the place. What moves me about Taunay’s Brazilian work is the effort visible in it: the strain of a sixty-year-old academic trying to adapt forty years of European apparatus to a new world. He never entirely managed it. As several scholars have noted, the enslaved figures in his landscapes are always small, always accessory, always absorbed into pastoral harmony — the darkness at the edge of the idyll that the idyll cannot acknowledge. The tropical forest is always tamed into paintable units. But in the best of the Rio canvases, you can feel the pressure of a reality that exceeds the frame.
He left in 1821, a year ahead of schedule, disappointed at his failure to succeed Lebreton as director of the academy, unconvinced the Brazilian market would ever sustain him, homesick for Paris and his colleagues. Four of his sons stayed. Félix became professor of drawing to the future emperor, then director of the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes from 1834 to 1851 — the institution his father had helped found and never seen open. His son Félix’s own son, Alfredo d’Escragnolle Taunay, would become one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers of the nineteenth century — the dynasty Nicolas-Antoine had inadvertently planted taking root in Brazilian literature as well as painting. Adrien, the youngest, had already served as draftsman on the Freycinet circumnavigation; in 1825 he replaced Rugendas as chief draftsman on the Langsdorff expedition into the Brazilian interior, when Rugendas quarreled with the expedition’s leader and left. On 5 January 1828, Adrien drowned crossing a flooded river in Mato Grosso. He was twenty-four. The father had stood safely at the cascade with his palette; the son was swallowed by the rivers of the interior. The picturesque, for one of them, was not a view but a fate.
The large painting Taunay made for Dom João with Taunay himself visible in the composition bowing to the royal cortège — hung for nearly two centuries at what became the Museu Nacional, UFRJ. An anonymous visitor in 1826 wrote of it with the kind of certainty that only posterity can defeat: ‘Taunay gave himself immortality: he will live in Rio de Janeiro as long as this painting exists.’ On September 2, 2018, the Museu Nacional burned. The painting no longer exists.
The cascade still bears his name.❖