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Auguste Borget (1809–1877), France
Near Mendoza
, 1837
Graphite on paper
Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Auguste Borget’s travels through South America began in 1837 when he boarded a merchant ship in Le Havre, France. The ship docked in Rio de Janeiro, after which Borget traveled overland to the Argentine Pampas, the Andean Cordillera, and onward to the United States. He made both of these sketches during his first year of travel. Like Wooded Landscape, many of his scenes lack human figures, picturing rustic, rural scenes with rugged vegetation characteristic of a picturesque landscape. Near Mendoza registers human inhabitants on a rustic road on the outskirts of Mendoza, a then-remote town in the Argentinian Cordillera near the border with Chile. In his travel journals, Borget describes his captivation in the face of what he saw as a distant fantasy and dreamlike landscape.

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