Pueyrredón, Prilidiano (1823-1870)
El rodeo (The rodeo)
1861
Oil on canvas, 76 x 166 cm
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
In a note probably written by Miguel Cané Sr., La Tribuna commented on the painting A Stop in the Country with the apt title Peace on the Ranch: “legitimate porteños born and raised in Lomas de Morón, near Buenos Aires, before stagecoaches, buses and railroads had come to depoeticize our suburbs.” In the same sense, it added “each character, children, old people, women, all, without monotony or effort are marked by the double seal of the similarity of family and race.” In this way, Prilidiano Pueyrredón’s canvas, an emblematic work of 19th century Argentine art, was already pointed out in its time as an identity representation: the adjective legitimate announces its antonym, especially when the paragraph mentions the consequences of progress: immigration, which began in those years, altered that similarity of family and race. From this reading, the work is inserted into a theme present in the artist’s production: the social change produced by immigration (for example in the paintings of 1865, El naranjero and Esquina porteña, both in private collections).
The landscape format, commonly used in regional painting, of Un alto en el campo allowed the artist to add minor anecdotal stories around two typical elements that balance the composition, marked by the strong diagonal of the road: the cart and the ombú. Pueyrredón made a compendium of established motifs for the representation of the rural countryside since the 1840s, disseminated by lithographic albums: the cart road, the rural family, the loving courtship, the gaucho in village dress, the ranch with ombú, the barley of the mate by the countrywoman, the meeting of countrymen on horseback. Perhaps, this excessive collection of local customs and record of their diverse clothing in the same canvas was due to the fact that they were intended to “decorate the living rooms of a wealthy family in England,” according to the aforementioned chronicle of La Tribuna. Pueyrredón‘s distinctive qualities in the mastery of naturalistic painting are affirmed in a brushstroke with little pictorial material, in the conventional use of color and in the firmness in resolving the figures in harmoniously related groups.
The rodeo (inv. 3189, MNBA) forms a narrative pair with A stop in the countryside about the rural world: work and leisure. The main group in the first painting, shifted to the left, is made up of three figures and their horses of various coats: the owner, the foreman and the rural labourer. It is the representation of a rural order that, absent of conflicts, allows for “peace on the ranches” in the second painting. Both works suggest a recent past, for example, cattle herding was a traditional practice when the advance of the sheep revolution had already modified rural production in Buenos Aires; the same was true of the “poetic” scene of peasant sociability. It is possible to think that Pueyrredón represented the end of the civil wars of the federal period – the result of that pax rosista described by Domingo F. Sarmiento.
The painting represents a rural world lost to the advance of modernization; in the words of La Tribuna, “the old uses and customs of our countryside disappear day by day.” This moralizing message is in keeping with the genre of rural customs, even more so when its historical aspects were represented. Pueyrredón was ideologically a man from Buenos Aires, politically active during the proto-state autonomy when he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1854. Furthermore, in the same year of 1861, he painted the portrait of Bernardino Rivadavia, one of his few historical portraits, and the following year he made the sketch for his only attempt at a historical painting: Solemn Oath of the Argentine Flag by the Army of General Belgrano (currently in the Enrique Udaondo Museum Complex, Luján). Both Rivadavia and Belgrano were founding heroes in the liberal discourse of the State of Buenos Aires and, particularly, in the historiographic work of Bartolomé Mitre. That is to say, the representation of the past is a strong motivation in these early years of the 1860s, which crosses the different pictorial genres: costumbrismo, portrait and historical painting.
Thus, A stop in the countryside is the beginning of a long series of paintings of rural customs in Argentine art, which goes into the last century, the purpose of which has been to point out that the modern nation possesses in the rural world the reservoir of an imagined Argentine identity. (Roberto Amigo | MNBA)