Juan Manuel Blanes

Juan Manuel Blanes (born June 8, 1830, Montevideo, Uruguay—died April 15, 1901, Pisa, Italy) was an Uruguayan painter known for his paintings of historical events in South America and his depictions of gaucho life.

Blanes was born into a turbulent period in Uruguayan history. Although the country had been independent since 1828, it was politically unstable and fell into civil war from 1843 to 1851. The dramatic events of Uruguayan history and the history of other South American nations, including Argentina and Chile, would provide Blanes with the subject matter that would occupy his career.

He was largely self-taught as an artist. During the civil war, he worked as a typographer’s assistant at the newspaper El Defensor de la Independencia Americana. He began painting in 1844 and in 1855 moved to the city of Salto, where he taught painting. In 1857 he traveled to Buenos Aires, and in 1859 he received a prize to study in Italy. Throughout the remainder of his life, Blanes would move between Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Europe, with an extended stay in Chile in 1873.

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In a letter to his brother in 1857, Blanes declared himself an “AMERICAN” painter (in the hemispheric sense), and his career reflects his dedication to the creation of an American painting. He worked in the formal academic style of 19th-century European painting, but his work was American in subject matter. He carefully documented the major historical events of Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, producing a huge number of military scenes. Many were panoramic and epic in scale, such as The Battle of Caseros (1856–57), which shows masses of anonymous troops and horses engaged in pitched battle. Blanes insisted that his paintings be historically accurate and detailed, and he relied on written and photographic accounts of the events he depicted. He made other historical paintings that were more intimate in scale, such as The Death of General Venancio Flores (1868), in which the assassinated general’s body sprawls in the foreground while a priest administers last rites. Even in his more majestic images, Blanes captured human detail, a reflection of the growing influence of naturalism in 19th-century painting.

In addition to making history paintings and portraits, Blanes also made images of gauchos. The independent gaucho who lived a solitary life on the Pampas became a nationalist icon for post-civil war Uruguayans. Although he strove for historical accuracy in his history paintings, Blanes romanticized gauchos, emphasizing their lives of self-reliance and freedom. He idealized the gaucho’s life in images such as Rest, in which a gaucho lies in a grassy plain while his horse patiently waits beside him. One of The Three Chiripás (c. 1881) shows a gaucho leaning on a hitching post, talking to a young woman. Other images showed gauchos working harmoniously in pairs. These romantic images ignored the violence and difficulty that dominated gaucho life. In 1898 Blanes returned to Italy and settled in Pisa, where he died three years later.