ROMANTICISMO Y PINTURA DE PAISAJE EN EL ECUADOR DECIMONÓNICO: EL CASO DE RAFAEL SALAS (1826-1906)

Abstract

The painter Rafael Salas Estrada (1826-1906) will be the initiator of landscape painting in Ecuador, understood from the postulates of romantic aesthetics, as a result of the teaching exercised during the two stays in the country of the frenchman Ernest Charton (1849 and 1862) as well as those of the North American Frederic Erwin Church (1853 and 1857). This will suppose a progressive change of paradigm in the canonical conceptions, formal and of content, that on painting and until that moment prevailed in Ecuador. Thus, the mandatory classicist formalization with its representational correlate based on, mainly, religious painting and portraits, they will be progressively and to a considerable extent displaced –especially the first one– by the new genre of landscape painting.