Andean Contemplation and Humboldtian Aesthetic Composition in Charles Empson's The Rustic Corridor

Abstract

The Rustic Corridor, one of twelve watercolors included in Narratives of South America (1836), written and illustrated by British traveler Charles Empson, represents the essence of Humboldtian aesthetic mountain observation at a very early stage of the Colombian Republic ́s interest in landscape. The formal and conceptual composition of this drawing determines a series of Humboldtian premises important in the study of mountain visual representation: intentional architecture needed to convey human scale, the importance of subjective observation as the main narrative in the image, and the lack of specificity of the place represented geographically. This illustration seems to encompass a feeling of universality where there is a viewer of the mountain range but there is also an audience for the onlookers. The solitary beholders of this magnificent place represent a new Colombian citizen who, through a rustic window, witnesses the millenary peaks of the Andes that have recently became a modern Republic. Like many other travelers, Empson builds this image in resonance with Humboldtian ideas of distance, infinity, structure, solitude, observation and universality.