On a latest journey with an expensive good friend to the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, I used to be fascinated by this portray—“Portrait of Miguel de la Torre y Pando” (Eliab Metcalf, 1826; Puerto Rico)—which I had beforehand missed or just ignored. Though I used to be on my technique to see a sequence of Victorian work which might be on mortgage from the Ponce Artwork Museum [yes—including Lord Leighton’s “Flaming June”!] this time, the palm timber, the ramparts of San Juan, and the acquainted form of the theater (now Teatro Tapia) stopped me in my tracks.
The subject material sounded acquainted and a fast search (first cease: Wikipedia) jogged my memory that Miguel de la Torre was a captain basic—and subsequently, governor—of Puerto Rico within the 1820s. The Wikipedia data [also see their reference to Relación circunstanciada de todas las obras publicas emprendidas en la isla de Puerto-Rico en el año de 1827] delivered to thoughts these center college historical past lessons the place we realized about numerous waves of colonial management on the island and what I wrongly recalled as “baile, bebida y baraja” [dance, drink, and deck (of cards)]: “La Torre’s foremost concern was stopping a insurrection on the island. Rigorously controlling the federal government, he instituted a coverage which he referred to as “dance, drink and cube” (baile, botella y baraja, just like the Romans “bread and circuses”), implying {that a} nicely entertained inhabitants won’t take into consideration revolution.”
Analysis on the painter, Massachusetts-born Eliab Metcalf (1785-1834), was much less out there in a radical on-line medium, however now I’m on a mission, partly as a result of it’s attention-grabbing to me that the majority biographies point out his 12 months in Guadeloupe and ten years in Cuba, however hardly ever point out Puerto Rico. Most of them state that he lived in “a number of Caribbean islands.”
For instance, the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum (SAAM) writes: “Early in his life, Eliab Metcalf was disabled by a extreme sickness, and he spent his maturity transferring from place to position, attempting to enhance his well being. Attracted by the local weather, he lived on Guadeloupe, a French island within the Caribbean Sea, from 1807 to 1808, after which moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. 5 years later, he arrived in New York, the place he started his skilled profession as an artist finding out portray with Samuel Waldo and William Jewett. His well being declined, and in 1819 he moved to New Orleans, then to a number of Caribbean islands earlier than settling completely in Cuba. He contracted cholera within the Havana epidemic of 1833, and died on his annual go to to New York Metropolis a 12 months later.” [. . .]
[To be continued…maybe.]
NOTE: These musings had been written with out consulting any of the specialists on the market, notably those that have been specializing in Puerto Rico and its representations—amongst them, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (The Oviedo Challenge), Mary Ann Gosser Esquilín (Tradition, Nature, and the Different in Caribbean Literature: An Ecocritical Strategy), and María Acosta Cruz (Dream Nation: Puerto Rican Tradition and the Fictions of Independence).