Raymond Monvoisin. Style and Pictorial Practice as Devices for the Transference of Fashions and Models of Appearance

Abstract

The political circumstances of the South American countries in the mid-nineteenth century, together with the intense development of Visual Culture both in Europe and throughout Latin America, had a fundamental impact on the way of fashioning the appearance. This article focuses on the links between Style and Representation of fashion in some works by the French painter Raymond Quinsac Monvoisin active in Argentina, Chile, Peru and Brazil. Although the diusion of fashions was achieved largely thanks to the circulation of prints and magazines, the role of portrait painting was fundamental in the exhibition of the ways of dressing, posing and showing oneself in public. In this sense, the techniques of depiction and representation, imported by artists such as Monvoisin, his pictorial traditions, the academic teaching, his inscription in regional and urban European artistic communities, left an imprint on the way he fashioned his models. The presence of French, English or Orientalist styles of dress was observed by his disciples in his works and carried over influencing the tastes and perception of a broader group of local clients and spectators.