The landscape of the coffee plantations in the crisis of slavery: the paintings by Nicolau Facchinetti and Georg Grimm

Abstract

Among the painters of the nineteenth century that registered the landscape of the slave coffee plantations of the Vale do Paraíba, the most remarkable were certainly the Italian Nicolau Facchinetti (1824-1900) and the German Georg Grimm (1846-1887). Facchinetti started to paint his landscapes by the end of the 1860's, although his main works were painted between 1875 and 1881. Grimm, on the other hand, worked on the composition of his canvases in the 1880's. This paper aims to examine the principles that structured the landscapes painted by both of them, and the nature of the dialogue they established with the crisis of the Brazilian slavery.