Territorial fantasies, sexual nuances, and savage energy: orientalism and tropicality in Eugène Delacroix and Johann Moritz Rugendas

In 1822, the German Romantic painter Johann Moritz Rugendas undertook his famed three-year journey across Brazil. Later, between 1831 and 1846, encouraged by Alexander von Humboldt and other Romantic artists, he would make a second trip through Mexico and South America. In 1832, Eugène Delacroix started a six-month journey to Spain and North Africa as a part of a diplomatic mission. Both artists profusely translated their travels into words and rich images of tropical America and the Orient. Their paintings and illustrations of remote lands and people became milestones in their respective careers while being prime examples of how Europe viewed and perceived the rest of the world in the nineteenth century. In hindsight, they were not only mere agents and promoters of two crucial aesthetic trends of that time: Orientalism and Tropicality but the embodiment of two ways of seeing and imagining the Others. This article places these two artists against each other, contrasting the set of ideas and cultural preconceptions resting behind a sizeable number of paintings, drawings, and illustrations of their Eastern and South American experiences. The central argument is that Tropicality and Orientalism were comparable phenomena based on similar tropes and assumptions. It brings forward recurring themes of Rugendas and Delacroix’s works, such as the eroticisation of female bodies and the linkage between South America and the East with everlasting ideas of violence, adventures, and savageness to prove such an equivalence.