Alexander von Humboldt and British artists: the Oriental taste

Humboldtian landscape is the best result of a close relationship between artists and scientists in the context of the Enlightenment. Many artists inspired Humboldt to develop his concept of landscape as the best way of representing Nature, but some British artists in particular were a strong reference for him. Thomas Daniell and William Hodges had travelled to Asia creating a particular imagery, which inspired the desire to travel and the feeling of the exotic taste in Humboldt. Around Humboldt, mainly two types of artists have been studied: on the one hand, painter travellers who received direct instructions from Humboldt after his experience in America, and on the other, artists who started their trips by themselves after reading his works. However, this paper is focused on the links between Humboldt and these British painters of the Orient, whom he met on a European tour with Georg Forster, before making his trip to America.


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Garrido cultureandhistory.revistas.csic.es/index.php/cultureandhistory/rt/printerFriendly/35/145 2/6 the strictest analytical view common to natural scientists and the artistic view of the painter, whose soul is touched by the sublime spectacle of nature.
Although Humboldt gained much from his contact with Spanish scientists such as, among others, Mutis and Malaspina (Puig-Samper, 2012), who had a wide and rich experience of New World Nature, he was considered to be the re-discoverer of America and, in fact, it is stated that he reinvented South America as nature itself, since "he never tired of admiring its majesty and noble vigour" (Gerbi, 2010: 321). Humboldt wanted to depict American nature in its fullness as he had experienced it, offering it to a civilized Europe in its wholly dramatic and extraordinary sense, which even exceeded the Linnaean categorization; a view capable of overwhelming human understanding (Pratt, 2010: 211-267). Even though he is mainly a scientist, he felt himself to be a romantic artist facing the lush American landscapes, where his narrative became particularly dramatic by the feelings produced by being face to face with the immensity of nature; these views moved Humboldt's soul. His understanding of nature as something which raised the human spirit, but which could also be scienti cally registered. In some points of his work, Humboldt struggled between his scienti c and his romantic spirit, confessing to be afraid of quantifying and classifying Nature, afraid of it becoming something graspable, so losing all of its evocative magic: It is almost with reluctance that I am about to speak of a sentiment, which appears to arise from narrow-minded views or from a certain weak and morbid sentimentality, I allude to the fear entertained by some persons, that nature may by degrees lose a portion of the charm and magic of her power, as we learn more and more how to unveil her secrets, comprehend the mechanism of the movements of the heavenly bodies, and estimated numerically the intensity of natural forces (Humboldt, 1848: 18).
In the Eighteenth-Century, a modern concept of the world replaced the vision of a harmonious cosmos with a new sense of order based on the scienti c method. In that sense, the voyages of discovery marked a turning point from the idea of a contained Nature to that of an uncontrollable cosmos. Also, the new discoveries had created a new way of living and of looking at Nature. When, in 1735, Linnaeus published Systema Naturae naturalist iconography reached a level of detail never seen before, being expressed in botanical and zoological drawings, which became tools of knowledge. At the same time, it was a historic moment for the History of Art, when aesthetic categories such as the sublime and picturesque began to be constantly discussed. Many travellers were circulating around the globe, recording everything they saw. Consequently we can notice three ways of looking and representing nature: the political, the scienti c and the artistic view; which are all closely related, as showed by Bernard Smith's work (1979& 1992 pursuit of knowledge motivated by a competition between nations that was, after all, the driving force of European Expansion. The political view is rather strategic and it could be represented by maps, a visual tool for controlling lands; the scienti c view could be visually materialized in the herbariums, however it could be different in speech but not in intentions inasmuch as Natural History was not unsel sh (Pratt, 2010). The Enlightenment Project consisted of the systematization of knowledge to enclose the entire surface of the Earth; moreover, the system of Nature as a descriptive paradigm in itself meant not only the possession of resources but a benign way of a global domination. The artistic view could be represented by independent artist travellers who went around the world by themselves. It would be necessary to differentiate between those painters enjoying the patronage of the Spanish imperial state (Bleichmar, 2012) and others employed by naturalists like those of Mutis's workshops, from these painters who wanted to experience an artistic tour.
On many scienti c expeditions, like those of Cook in the Paci c, Nature began to be emancipated from art and became a model for art itself, and the new exotic nature especially demanded new criteria of judgment (Kwa, 2005 (Stafford, 1984). In this context Humboldt can be assumed to be one of the rst independent travellers, by which his new way of looking at nature can be understood as the result of the whole spirit of his time. Humboldt's achievement was to merge the most rigorous study of geography with the feeling that produced in man the internal forces of Nature. Humboldt explained that this combination of ways of looking needed more than a strict study of the rules, to understand the immensity of the cosmos in his soul, and this feeling could be only depicted with the art of landscape.
As the concept Humboldtian science (Jardine, Secord & Spary, 1996;Dettelbach, 1996)  Nowadays Humboldt's discourse can be placed not only in the scienti c category, to which it certainly belongs, but also in an aesthetic discourse. In fact, he really felt great admiration for painting because of its wide capacity to report information beyond the words, as he said: "Notwithstanding all the richness and adaptability of our language, the attempt to designate in words, that which, in fact, appertains only to the imitative art of painter, it is always fraught with di culty." (Humboldt, 1850: 223) For him, landscape was much more than a genre painting; it was the perfect way of presenting a set of interrelated forces in an "overall impression" which, at the same time, could also be dissected in each single detail. In this regard, Humboldt was one of the early pioneers in the modern sense of the term landscape, considering it as an entity embracing relationships of nature, society and culture as a concrete totality (Gómez Mendoza & Sanz Herraiz, 2010).
In his extensive travels, Alexander von Humboldt became the rst to conceptualize a natural landscape and feeling the Nature in a whole sense, looking at vegetation and environment with a painterly gaze. With the practice of travelling as the development of his writing, this traveller makes both a global science of nature, and not surprisingly he sometimes had internal dilemmas over the strictly scienti c language and the expression that emerges from the deepest human feelings. Publications after his trip, were the result of a re ection after his empirical experience, which showed the interesting relationship between the personal experience of travelling and the scienti c analysis, thus, Humboldt was the rst in "describing the American mountain panorama as an aesthetic space" (Ette, 2008: 86 Löschner, 1976). Even though Humboldt's interest in landscape painting was present mainly in his great last work Cosmos (1849), he had already outlined a theory about that in Essai sur la Géographie des Plantes (1805), but he would deal with it especially in his work Ansichten der Natur (1808) and later in Vues des Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l'Amérique (1810). In the last one he included large-format illustrations, carefully chosen by him and with the collaboration of many artists based in Rome. In 1789, Alexander von Humboldt had entered the University of Göttingen. This school was the most modern and progressive in Germany, located in the electorate of Hanover, whose leaders had close links with England, therefore the lessons being taught had much of the "British common sense" (Hagen-Hein, 1987: 20  year in Benares ..." (Théodoridès, 1966). Humboldt contacted the o ce of the East India Company several times, even with the support and protection of the King of Prussia for his Indian project. But unfortunately all this pressure was to no avail.

VUES DES CORDILLÈRES: VIEWS OF EXOTIC NATURE
Among the reproductions that were generated on Humboldt's journeys, undoubtedly Vues des Cordillères holds a really special place as one of the most spectacular works of the Prussian scientist. This great American picture book, conceived initially as an Atlas Pittoresque, consists of more than sixty illustrations and narrative fragments. However, this is not a work of images with texts, nor a narrative supplemented by Daniel. (Humboldt, 1810: v)  Although he mentions Daniel [with one "l"], he makes a reference to his published work Oriental Scenery and it is certain that he was aware of the impact this work had been in England, as it was mentioned in a previous study of the Spanish edition of the Vues (Puig-Samper & Rebok, 2010 These examples of a delineation of the physiognomy of natural scenery were not followed by many artist of merit before Cook's second voyage of circumnavigation. What Hodges did for the western islands of the Paci c, and my distinguished countryman, Ferdinand Bauer, for New Holland and Van Diemen's Land, has been since done, in more recent times, on a far grander scale, and in a masterly manner, by Moritz Rugendas, Count Clarac, Ferdinand Bellermann, and Edward Hildebrandt; for the tropical vegetation of America (Humboldt, 1849: 451).
Therefore, Hodge's and the Daniells' work could represent an important precedent in the visual representations developed by the Humboldtian landscape. These in uences have not been su ciently studied, nevertheless it is easy to nd some parallels, or perhaps a direct in uence, in the way that William Hodges and the Daniells looked to the Orient and how Humboldt looked to the Tropics.
While Hodges was a painter of the sublime, the Daniells composed their Indian landscapes to render the places they saw in India as literally and as accurately as possible. The American landscape defended by Humboldt was, indeed, the symbiosis between those two ways of understanding the art of painting: study and feeling. Oriental Scenery by Thomas Daniell, was publicly praised many times for its scienti c precision; James Rennell, considered to be "the father of Indian Geography" talk about the work of Thomas Daniell in his most important work (Rennell, 1783: 369):

Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan
Some geographical information concerning the upper part of the course of the Ganges, and its principal branches, appears at the foot of a very characteristic and beautiful sketch drawn by Mr. Daniel (...) as far as they go exhibit that rm attachment to truth and honesty of discrimination which I have observed in all of the works of this ingenious artist.
Likewise, when the engravings of the Daniells began to be known across London society, the Monthly Magazine admitted Daniell's scienti c usefulness even for Natural History in an article (Almeida & Gilpin, 2006: 191): The execution of these drawings is indeed masterly; there is every reason to con de in the delity of the representations and the effect produced by this rich and splendid display of Oriental Scenery is truly striking. Everything is drawn with the most astonishing accuracy.
The animals, trees and plants are studies for the naturalists.  (Price, 1796;Payne Knight, 1805;and Repton, 1806). It was closely linked to the boundaries of art and nature (Hipple, 1957) and to the experience of Le Grand Tour, which Humboldt did in the company of Georg Forster. Picturesque was a term frequently used by Humboldt which connected him directly with the aesthetics of the English landscape painters who he probably met on the European tour. Among Humboldt's written works, Vues was a singular masterpiece in his production composed by images and related text, the same structure which Hodges and Daniell had chosen for their works of India. These artists worked according to principles which would become an important part of Humboldtian thinking, like analysis and synthesis, the recognition of the individual elements of a landscape and the integration of them in a whole through the art of painting. However, both worked like artists but also in the progress of knowledge.
Humboldt's attraction to the exotic was a constant in his works and it had existed since his youth. In the rst volume of his Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, fait en 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803y 1804par Al. de Humboldt et A. Bonpland (1814, he has already talked about his failed plan to travel to Egypt: Je me croyois très-près du moment où je m'embarquerois pour l'Égypte, quand les événemens politiques me rent abandonner un plan qui me promettoit tant de jouissances. La situation de l'Orient étoit telle, qu'un simple particulier ne pouvoit espérer de suivre des travaux qui, même dans des temps plus paisibles, exposent souvent le voyageur à la mé ance des gouvernemens (Humboldt, 1814: 42) During the Napoleonic wars it was di cult to travel eastwards, so Humboldt turned west and was extraordinarily fortunate to secure a passport from King Charles IV of Spain to enter the Spanish American possessions. However, this failed trip to the Middle East could be assumed even as a stimulus (Lubrich, 2003); also as Columbus's speculative proposal was to reach the East Indies and ironically, a failed oriental expedition was the starting point for the second discoverer of America.
Until the late Eighteenth-Century, British society did not have a visual idea of what was India, which would be based on rst-hand observations of the artists. The imagery that was clear from the illustrations made by professional engravers who had never in fact been in India, gave rise to all kinds of dreams and fantasies, which would be progressively transformed into images by the artists working in situ, but inevitably through a European thought lter. This was very similar to what had happened to the image of America (Duviols, 1986). In fact, in recent years, some scholars have been noticing how the traditional discourse of tropicalism can be compared with that of Said's Orientalism (1978), in some way both legitimized essential differences between cultures and natures (Driver & Martins, 2005 aesthetic categories such as the picturesque and the sublime were supposed to be the big reason for these artists to embark on expeditions to unusual places, and these de nitions t perfectly with the scenes the Orient offered them; after seeing their landscapes, Humboldt undoubtedly felt the desire to discover the exotic, as he said. Finally, Vues turns out to be a constant comparison of the exotic between Asia and Latin America.

CONCLUSION
Humboldt believed in the importance of travel as a rst-hand observation of nature, but he also stressed the need to convey the feelings that nature produced in man. As a scientist, Humboldt understood that nature must to be represented as accurately as possible, and as romantic, he understood that landscape art reproduced the natural world through its re ection in man's soul, which allowed it to be understood as a whole.
He appeared as the synthesis between strict analytical view common to the natural scientist and the artist's view in awe at the sight of Nature.
For this reason, it would not be strange to think that he could have been inspired by artists at the time of preparing his Atlas Pittoresque. The most interesting thing, indeed, is unravelling the different views which gave rise to Humboldt's visual thinking. Moreover, the publications of artists like the Daniells and William Hodges could be considered also as singular masterpieces which broke the boundaries between arts and sciences. Besides those already referred to, Daniell contributed to the knowledge of India, some early studies are beginning to readdress the work of William Hodges to a new point of view, considering his contributions to ethnology, history of geographical exploration, Indian history and the development of empirical science (Quilley & Bone ll, 2004). If we compare the plates, analyzing some iconographic elements, their great variety and their richness of information, it is easy to nd similarities of composition, and those images could also be considered as "pictures of nature", as Humboldt would theorize a few years later.
Moreover, there is still much that might be said about Humboldt's relations with England and his rst trips to Europe, a kind of Grand Tour that has not been deeply studied. In the England of the Eighteenth-century visited by Humboldt, the revolution of aesthetic theory favoured the artistic discovery of exotic worlds like India. This was the reason for artists to embark on expeditions to the East and probably Humboldt also felt the same, looking for the landscapes offered by the tropical regions. These pictures inspired Humboldt to travel and feel the exotic tastes, to the point of trying a new expedition to Asia, which alas, was nally thwarted.