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Lot Essay
From the Sierra Madres to the Cordillera, all corners of Latin America saw the arrival of ambitious artists from Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This veritable phenomenon included landscape luminaries like the German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas and the American Hudson River School artist Frederic Edwin Church as well as enterprising photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and even the early filmmaker Thomas Edison. While the majority of these men were peripatetic travelers, passing a year or two in one country before moving on to the next to be "discovered" tropical paradise, the German painter August Löhr was exceptional in that he lived and worked in Mexico for twenty-one years. Arriving in Mexico by way of the United States in 1890, Löhr settled in, exhibiting at the country's prestigious Academia de San Carlos, developing a following of clients and patrons and leaving only with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution.
Löhr's formative artistic years spent painting the Alps in his native Bavaria and then later cycloramas--enormous, all-encompassing panoramas often depicting complex historical subjects--in Munich and the United States, served him well when it came to rendering the sweeping vistas of the Valley of Mexico with its formidable mountain ranges and snow-capped volcanic peaks. Löhr's Mexican work also suggests an indebtedness to the country's greatest nineteenth-century landscapist José María Velasco. Best known for his paintings of the Valley of Mexico that combine idyllic Claudian principles with precise topographical detail and nationalist symbolism, Velasco was an eminent nineteenth-century figure whose work Löhr certainly considered when rendering those same iconic landscapes.
With its carefully balanced composition and meticulous rendering of flora, fauna and geography, the present painting is decidedly Velasco-esque. Yet, Löhr distanced himself from the Mexican master by including a genre scene within his expansive panorama. In the foreground, beneath the majestic peaks of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, a group of weary travelers in sombreros and serapes gather round a camp fire while their saddled donkeys meander among the maguey plants and stream. The warm glow of the fire and the enveloping golden light of a full moon lend a sense of comfort to this scene, suggesting that these men are very much at home in the open air of the Valley of Mexico, much like the artist who painted them.
Löhr's formative artistic years spent painting the Alps in his native Bavaria and then later cycloramas--enormous, all-encompassing panoramas often depicting complex historical subjects--in Munich and the United States, served him well when it came to rendering the sweeping vistas of the Valley of Mexico with its formidable mountain ranges and snow-capped volcanic peaks. Löhr's Mexican work also suggests an indebtedness to the country's greatest nineteenth-century landscapist José María Velasco. Best known for his paintings of the Valley of Mexico that combine idyllic Claudian principles with precise topographical detail and nationalist symbolism, Velasco was an eminent nineteenth-century figure whose work Löhr certainly considered when rendering those same iconic landscapes.
With its carefully balanced composition and meticulous rendering of flora, fauna and geography, the present painting is decidedly Velasco-esque. Yet, Löhr distanced himself from the Mexican master by including a genre scene within his expansive panorama. In the foreground, beneath the majestic peaks of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, a group of weary travelers in sombreros and serapes gather round a camp fire while their saddled donkeys meander among the maguey plants and stream. The warm glow of the fire and the enveloping golden light of a full moon lend a sense of comfort to this scene, suggesting that these men are very much at home in the open air of the Valley of Mexico, much like the artist who painted them.