The Wanderer, the Slave and the Aboriginal: Augustus Earle in Rio de Janeiro and Sydney in the 1820s

Thomas, Sarah (2009) The Wanderer, the Slave and the Aboriginal: Augustus Earle in Rio de Janeiro and Sydney in the 1820s. In: Anderson, J. (ed.) Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence. Carlton, Australia: Miegunyah Press. ISBN 9780522857108.

Abstract

British-born artist Augustus Earle (1793-1838) spent his life travelling and painting the colonies of the ‘New World’. He lived in Rio de Janiero from 1820 until 1824, a key period in the history of Brazil which saw the collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire and the birth of an independent nation. From 1825 to 1828 he lived in Sydney, where he witnessed the rapid construction of a city driven by British money, civic ambitions and dogged determination. For both Rio and Sydney the 1820s was a decade of radical transition and racial tension – between on the one hand the Portuguese and the Africans who had been imported to Brazil as slaves since the 1550s, and on the other, British settlers and Aborigines. Earle was particularly interested in portraying Brazil’s black slaves, which he did with great compassion, and the dispossessed Aborigines living in and around Sydney. These paintings are profoundly disquieting, and raise significant questions not only about racial relationships in the two cities, but perhaps more significantly about the disparate forms of colonialism in countries which were colonised almost three hundred years apart. This comparative study brings to bear issues of race, religion, power and authority.

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